Valerio Tricoli & Hanno Leichtmann, record release concert: Cinnte le Dia (NI VU NI CONNU 2024)

Cinnte le Dia is the third collaborative album by Hanno Leichtmann and Valerio Tricoli, following 2016’s The Future of Discipline and 2018’s La Casa delle Chimere, both on the Entr'acte label. Cinnte le Dia presents a synthesis of the two approaches, features Leichtmann with his synth-bass again and Tricoli with his trusted Revox B77 and combines the special energy of their performance in front of a live audience with the intimate atmosphere of a studio session. The pieces are marked by their sonic density, but also a rhythmic intricacy that negotiates a place between bass-heavy, dubbed-out club music and electroacoustic and musique concrète techniques. 

Katinka Kleijn, solo cello & electronics

Katinka Kleijn is a Dutch-born cellist who enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Much of her work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for their devised piece Water On the Bridge. Similarly, Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) uses a shared-circuit synthesizer to articulate relationships between the human and cello body. RESIDUUM (2022), a short experimental film by Kleijn and Aliya Ultan, pairs Kleijn's cello with large amounts of mylar, plastic bottles and soda cans. Her collaborations with Daniel Dehaan and performance-art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in Intelligence in the Human-Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn’s cello and her own brainwaves which Time magazine called “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.”

Nowhere Street #20

Lisa Ullén (piano), Elsa Bergman (bass) & Anna Lund (drums)

Space is a piano trio based in Stockholm that plays free jazz channeling the American free jazz tradition as well as contemporary classical music. Combining raw power with an exquisite attention to detail, the three musicians (all members of Anna Högberg Attack) make every moment sparkle with possibilities. In this aural space, every movement matters.  

Christina Wheeler and Dudù Kouaté first met playing with the Art Ensemble of Chicago for the album recording and performances tied to their 50th Anniversary season. Tonight's concert features a solo performance by Christina and the first duo performance of Christina and Dudù .

Christina Wheeler, voice, glass armonica, Array mbira, QChord, autoharp, Theremini, electronics

Dudù Kouaté, percussion, xalam, kanjira, djembe, tama, calabash, African flutes, vocals, electronics

Owen Gardner, Where Is My Hand in Space? for microtonal guitar & fixed media  

Robyn Schulkowsky, solo triangle

In his latest release, Owen Gardner continues his project of defamiliarizing traditional musical grammar. Gardner treats sound equally as matter and as an articulation of time, while perception is a means to soften the boundaries between performer, audience, and their environment.

Percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky has dedicated herself to revealing the wonders of percussion to people all over the world. Her continuous exploration of new sound dimensions has led to the development of many new and unusual instruments. Schulkowsky moved to Germany during a heyday of experimental and adventurous classical composition and has since premiered and recorded some of the most important percussion works of the 20th and 21st centuries, working with composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kevin Volans, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Iannis Xenakis.

Entangled Sounds 2024 #1

Ale Hop, solo set for electric guitar & electronics

Sascha Brosamer, solo set for gramophone & electric guitar

The relaunch of Karin Weisenbrunner's Entangled Sounds series begins with solo sets by Ale Hop and Sascha Brosamer.

For complex pop arrangements and contemporary electronic music, Ale Hop combines synthesisers with the tactility of the electric guitar. The Peruvian-born sound artist combines an extensive repertoire of advanced techniques and modifications for electric guitar and real-time sampling devices to create a sonic vocabulary of striking physical intensity. 

Sascha Brosamer combines electric guitar and gramophone. By interactively transmitting the sounds of his gramophone playing to the audience's mobile phone speakers, he projects his archaeological sound research into the digital context of the present.

(with kind support from INM Berlin e.V.)  

Divide by Zero #2

The second concert in Nick Dunston's series features a solo set by Camilla Battaglia, Perpetual Possibility for voice & live processing, and a duo set by Mariana Carvalho (pre-recorded materials, transducers, small speaker, internal listening) with Zach Hart (electronics).

Alternative rock band Lotto performs music from its recent album Summer, which marked a major change of pace for the band, featuring an acoustic sound and intimate performance style.

Mike Majkowski (bass), Łukasz Rychlicki (guitar, bass) & Paweł Szpura (drums)

To mark his 65th birthday, Peter Ablinger presents musical works and video produced over the past two decades, featuring performances by Peter Ablinger (voice), Biliana Voutchkova and Nurit Stark (violins), Erik Drescher (flute) & Wolfgang Musil (sound design)

Program:

And den Mond (2021) for chanting violinist and playback

Wieder die Natur (2020) for glissando flute, 19 bottles, ultrasonic flutes, bird calls and playback

Golden Grate (2020) found situation, audio/video

Ohne Titel 1-10 (2005), two violins

out of commission (2020/23) small study with in-throat mic 

SS Giovanni e Paolo (2007/2012) for glisssando flute und playback

GLÄSERSCHRANK for metal shelf, glasses, transducer, from Projektionen (2022) 

PEOPLE'S PEOPLE for Violin and Wallstreet, from instrumente und rauschen (2019/2022)

Countdown for voice, from augmented studies (2014)

For decades, Peter Ablinger's work has been forcing open fault lines in the topography of the audible. His vast output of scores, electronic pieces, installations, and conceptual works consistently finds ways—funny, pointed, disturbing—to put the ear's organization of reality in doubt. Is that a voice, and what is a voice? When is something newly or no longer music? Noise? Information? In Ablinger's cunning scramble of sonic categories, listening loses its lay of the land. Concepts come unmoored from sounds, and the land changes shape. (Seth Brodsky)  

Since 1982, Peter Ablinger has lived in Berlin, where he has initiated and conducted numerous festivals and concerts. In 1988 he founded the Ensemble Zwischentöne. He has been guest conductor of Klangforum Wien, United Berlin and the Insel Musik Ensemble. Since 1990, he has worked as a freelance musician. In 2012 he became a member of the Academy of Arts Berlin, and from 2012-2017 he was research professor at the University of Huddersfield. 

ablinger.mur.at

(with kind support from INM Berlin e.V.)

Apparat+ kicks off its New Music for Brass series with a solo set by Ute Wassermann (voice, bird whistles) and three works by Hanna Hartman.

Program:  

Ute Wasermann, solo for voice and bird whistles

Hanna Hartman,  Metusalem for solo horn and tape

Hanna Hartman, The Fog Factory, electroacoustic work

Hanna Hartman, The Garden for horn, trombone and tuba

Weston Olencki (trombone), Samuel Stoll (horn), Max Murray (tuba)

(with kind support from INM Berlin e.V.)

A trio set by Amirtha Kidambi (voice & electronics), Andrea Parkins (accordion, electronics, objects) & James Banner (double bass) and a set by Transsonic, featuring Nicola Hein (guitar, electronics) and Viola Yip (lights, electronics), the transmedia duo that creates immersive site-specific performances and installations bridging the vibrations of light and sound

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (double bass), Marta Warelis (piano), Mette Rasmussen (sax), Karl Hjalmar Nyberg (sax), Jonathan Horne (guitar) & Olaf Olsen (drums) 

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s new band Knarr is a musical plethora that draws from the Norwegian bassist’s extensive background across different genres and traditions. Knarr (or "Exit") started as a commissioned work by the Vossa Jazz festival, but soon evolved into a working band, releasing Exit (Knarr) in 2021 with a second album forthcoming in 2024. 

(with kind support from Better Live Music)

Nowhere Street #21  

Maya Bennardo, solo violin

Program: 

Linda Catlin Smith, aria  (2024)

Kristofer Svensson, Så vill jag glömma (2018)

Maya Bennardo, dormant gardens 1b. (2022)

Maya Bennardo is a founding member of the violin/viola duo andPlay and a member of the internationally acclaimed Mivos Quartet. She also performs new and traditional repertoire for violin and piano with pianist Karl Larson in their Bennardo/Larson Duo. Maya's compositions are characterized by slow, unfolding timbral movements exploring the co-existence of pitch and noise. Her compositions have grown naturally out of her improvisational practice on the violin, and the two continue to inform each other. 

Peter Evans (trumpet), Joel Ross (vibraphone), NIck Jozwiak (double bass) & Michael Ode (drums)

Being & Becoming was formed in 2017 by composer and trumpet player Peter Evans. The name of the band, drawn from the writing of Sufi writer and musician Inyat Khan, reflects the group's commitment to the challenge of spontaneous creativity. Evans' compositions for the band draw from a wide variety of sources, traditional and experimental, with a grounding in improvisational idioms, notated concert music and an array of experimental approaches.

Influences for the music range from the work of masters like McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane, 20th-century European modernism, compositional strategies pioneered by the AACM, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and many more. The result is something that feels new and old at once, an experimentalism grounded in both rigor and a passion for the undiscovered.

Peter Evans (trumpet), Joel Ross (vibraphone), NIck Jozwiak (double bass) & Michael Ode (drums)

Being & Becoming was formed in 2017 by composer and trumpet player Peter Evans. The name of the band, drawn from the writing of Sufi writer and musician Inyat Khan, reflects the group's commitment to the challenge of spontaneous creativity. Evans' compositions for the band draw from a wide variety of sources, traditional and experimental, with a grounding in improvisational idioms, notated concert music and an array of experimental approaches.

Influences for the music range from the work of masters like McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane, 20th-century European modernism, compositional strategies pioneered by the AACM, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and many more. The result is something that feels new and old at once, an experimentalism grounded in both rigor and a passion for the undiscovered.

Power Loom #18

Power Loom kicks off its 2024 series with solo sets by Sholto Dobie and Alanas Gurinas.

Sholto Dobie performs with self-constructed wind instruments. An air pump is attached to a series of reeded and metal pipes from various sources (e.g., organs, bagpipes and khene) which are brought to life by an interrelated system of timer modules and valves.

Alanas Gurinas is an interdisciplinary artist working with sonic performances and audiovisual installations. In his sonic practice he explores sound as a textural phenomena, working with the themes of ephemerality and the relations between various audible and inaudible objects and spaces.

New works by Ramesh Vinayakam, Cathy Milliken, and Jeremy Woodruff, and Teerath Majumder, performed by Shantala Subramanyam (South Indian flute and voice) with Anirudh Bhat (mrdangam), Theodor Flindell (violin) and Theo Nabicht (bass clarinet)

+ open workshop (19:00 to 20:00), Shantala Subramanyam on Carnatic music as listening practice and gamaka/rhythmic concepts 

The Sonic Borderlines Festival 2024 presents music that integrates new playing techniques across cultural sound boundaries. Sound production, vocal and instrumental techniques are still largely unexplored in Western musical practice because of the immutability of our concept of notes (on paper) in this respect. Most non-European classical traditions are characterized by a more fluid, ornate and flexible sound of voices, instruments and rhythm. In Indian, Turkish and Arabic music, sound production is based less on the concept of notes on a page and more on, for example, swaras (region of sound) or naghmas (originally referring to both "modulation" and "singing“).

program

Ramesh Vinayakam, Arrangements
Cathy Milliken, Unswarad?
Jeremy Woodruff, Intramelodies April 2024
Teerath Majumder, Lines that Divide, Lines that Connect

with kind support from INM Berlin e.V. & Musikfonds

Elias Stemeseder (piano, harpsichord, synthesizers), Camilo Ángeles (flute, electronics) & Christian Lillinger (drums, electronics)

Stemeseder & Lillinger released their trilogy Penumbra, Umbra, and Antumbra from 2022-24 and have now tapped Camilo Ángeles to form an electroacoustic trio that debuted in Mexico City and Guadalajara in Feburary 2024.

Double record release concert for Theo Nabicht's Circle Line Project. Two separate LPs are released for the London and Vienna segments of the cycle, following on individual productions for Berlin, Tokyo, and Moscow. The Circle Line Project focuses on the sonic imprint of transportation lines used by countless passengers in cities around the world. 

Theo Nabicht (contrabass clarinet) with Alexandre Babel (drums, percussion) and Joke Lanz (turntables)

Divide by Zero #3 

Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu, solo cello 

Song Yi Jeon, voice, electronics

Henrik Olsson, friction, piezo elements, turntable

Marina Cyrino, amplified flute and piccolo

Making Waves #1

Between You and Me It Stinks in Here

Emily Dische-Becker & Basma al-Sharif lead a talk on censorship in Berlin, accompanied by the German premiere of Basma al-Sharif's short film Capital. 

Doors 20:00 / start 20:30 / entry by donation

Emily Dische-Becker is a writer, organizer, and curator. She’s the German director of Diaspora Alliance, an international organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism and its instrumentalization, as well as a researcher for Forensic Architecture. 

Basma al-Sharif is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. Her practice looks at cyclical political conflicts and confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works. 

richard valitutto, solo piano, plays Julius Eastman’s Piano 2 (the only surviving fully-intact composition for solo instrument by the late queer black American composer); Linda Catlin Smith’s half-hour cycle nocturnes and chorales; and shorter works by Federico Mompou, Michael Finnissy, and Frederic Chopin.

Anne Gillis is a visual artist, composer and performer. Her music consists of usually short tracks built from looped sound samples originating mostly from found objects and, prominently, her own voice purring, hushing, and growling. There is an animal and primitive quality to her sound palette, her concrete music being made of closely miked bodily sound samples, but also because of the elementary means of composition she uses: only brief instruments, simple loops of admittedly elaborated sounds. 

Augustė Vickunaitė is a sound artist using reel-to-reel tape recorders to play, record and create sound installations, articulating diverse layers of recordings including found material, field recordings, voice, music instruments, objects, and the whole spectrum of malfunctions of decaying technology. 

Members of the long-standing European Music Project (EMP) perform Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time and related works.

Preludes for piano (1929)

Two quarter-tone monodies (1938), arranged for solo cello

Theme and Variations (1932), for violin & piano

Quartet for the End of Time (1941) for violin, cello, clarinet & piano

Emmanuelle Bernard (violin), Mathis Mayr (cello), Manfred Preis (clarinet) & Antonis Anissegos (piano)

New works by Bakr Khleifi, Mathis Mayr, Cathy Milliken and Jeremy Woodruff performed by Claudia van Hasselt (mezzo soprano), Bakr Khleifi (oud) and Mathis Mayr (cello)

+ open workshop (19:00 to 20:00) on Arabic maqam and oud led by Bakr Khleifi

The Sonic Borderlines Festival 2024 presents music that integrates new playing techniques across cultural sound boundaries. Sound production, vocal and instrumental techniques are still largely unexplored in Western musical practice because of the immutability of our concept of notes (on paper) in this respect. Most non-European classical traditions are characterized by a more fluid, ornate and flexible sound of voices, instruments and rhythm. In Indian, Turkish and Arabic music, sound production is based less on the concept of notes on a page and more on, for example, swaras (region of sound) or naghmas (originally referring to both "modulation" and "singing“).

with kind support from INM Berlin e.V. & Musikfonds

Austin Larkin, solo violin, presents Violin Liquid Phases, which focuses on the psychoacoustic possibilities of the violin (harmonic tuning, rhythmic phasing, spectral bowing) as well as on landscapes of energy (catharsis, ekstasis).

Quentin Tolimieri performs new works for solo piano and quadraphonic sound.

with kind support from the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt 

A split bill featuring Chris Abrahams (solo piano) and The Still, the instrumental quartet of Chris Abrahams (piano), Rico Lee (electric guitar), Derek Shirley (double bass) & Steve Heather (drums)

Chris Abrahams is a pianist and composer who has released 12 solo piano albums to date. His collaborative projects include duos with Melanie Oxley, Mike Cooper, and Alessandro Bosetti and trios including TREE with Burkhard Beins and Andrea Ermke, AAA with Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avinaim, and The Necks with Lloyd Swanton and Tony Buck.

Originally formed as a soundtrack project for Stephen Eastaugh's Winterover (documenting a winter residency in Antarctica), The Still creates song-forms diluted by overtones and resonances that melt together into a cyclical trance, promising no resolution. Their debut album The Still (Seriés Aphōnos) was deemed "a beautifully recorded future classic" and named one of Mojo Magazine's Top 30 albums of 2016. Their followup Got It  (Seriés Aphōnos) was released in 2021.

Power Loom #19

Power Loom presents solo electronics sets by JD Zazie and Rubén Patiño.

JD Zazie is an experimental DJ, avant-turntablist and sound artist. Coming from a DJ and a radiophonic background JD Zazie has explored over the years different approaches to real-time manipulation of fixed recorded sound. 

Patiño is an artist working in the field of electronic music, operating in a hybrid territory that incorporates elements of club culture and contemporary art. He is part of N.M.O., a fluxus-techno military space music project with Morten Joh.

Ned Collette (guitar/voice), Chris Abrahams (piano), Judith Hamann (cello and organ), Fredrik Kinbom (bass) and Steve Heather (drums and percussion) 

Ned Collette’s songs serve as departure points for longer improvisations and explorations by this Berlin-based quintet. Collette has long established himself as a singer and songwriter whose literate, evocative songs are paired with music that's both adventurous and eclectic. Much like on his albums, the sets are crafted with an overall arc in mind, both musically and narratively. Typical confessional “songwriter” tropes are eschewed in favour of abstraction and character studies; rumination rather than certainty confronts the world we are faced with. 

Lea Bertucci, solo saxophone, flute, voice & electronics

crys cole, objects & electronics

Lea Bertucci is an artist, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology applied to field recording and sampling/collage techniques. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-specific and site-responsive sonic investigations of architecture and acoustics.

crys cole is sound artist who works in composition, performance, sound sculpture, and installation. Taking a conceptual approach, she generates subtle and imperfect sounds through haptic gestures and seemingly mundane materials to create texturally nuanced electro-acoustic works that continuously retune the ear. 

PHILM  

Philipp Gropper (tenor saxophone, composition), Elias Stemeseder (piano / synthesizer), Robert Landfermann (double bass) & Leif Berger (drums) 

PHILM, founded by Philipp Gropper in 2012 and named Band of the Year in 2021 (Deutcher Jazzpreis), performs music from its forthcoming release, building on an already formidable discography, including Licht (2012), The Madman of Naranam (2015), Sun Ship (2017), Live at the Bimhuis (2018) and Consequences (2019), all on Berlin label Why Play Jazz.

Kaj Duncan David, Only birds know how to call the sun and they do it every morning

Kaj Duncan David (keys and synthetic vocals) with Scenatet: Vicky Wright (EWI), Mikkel Schou (MIDI and electric guitar) and Matias Seibæk (MIDI percussion)

A psychedelic re-imagining of how language develops, or the transition from pure vocal sound to meaning as musical gesture. The songs are inspired by glossolalia in various forms: in infants who are still learning to speak; in states of consciousness where semantics dissolve; and "hallucinating" chatbots, which might be able to speak, but do so without understanding what they say.

Stellan Veloce, solo set for harmonicas and electronics

The har­mon­i­ca is seen both as a toy and as an expres­sive musi­cal instru­ment, depend­ing on who you are ask­ing. Its inex­pen­sive­ness and egal­i­tar­i­an aura are opposed to the rich chords it pro­duces and its sub­tle micro­ton­al and melis­mat­ic impro­vi­sa­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties. Since 2020, Veloce has been making pieces for cus­tom-tuned, dia­ton­ic harmonicas both as solos and in collaboration with other musicians and ensembles.    

Four composers present recent works that actualize the potentials of place and time in long-term if not life-time projects.

program:

Joseph Kudirka, Musique Suisse

Stefan Thut, another

Manfred Werder, [ the music of history ]

Nicolás Carrasco, sin título series 

Nicolás Carrasco (objects), Joseph Kudirka (music box, contrabass, objects), Stefan Thut (viol, objects), Manfred Werder (objects)

Music reflects the strata of cultural history in a conceptually condensed way. We always find the strategy of layering, which enables us to encounter the folded world in a certain and at the same time indeterminate way. This seems to be of importance: The precision with which the indeterminacy of each layer is attempted to be rendered. In the strata of cultural history, we never know exactly what is going on and where we find ourselves, they are impenetrable, but in some places, as infinitely gliding lines without points, we sense that we can interact, traversing and touching the impenetrable in certain ways. These are the moments in which ideas arise, ideas about the world that gain consistency in the immediate contact with the things of the world. This potentiality comes sometimes much closer to being violently shaken, in everyday survival anyway, and also in the arts as there is no escaping from the abyss of ambivalence. If we want to work on real ideas about the world, we cannot avoid radically surrendering to this gliding in the impenetrable layers of the world: Infinitely traversing the thresholds.

With kind support from Ernst Göhner Stiftung and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia 

Michael J. Schumacher, solo set with PMcSS (The Portable Multi-Channel Sound System)

Bryan Eubanks (saxophone electronics) & Kaffe Matthews (The Ripley & electronics) present their recent work as a duo. 

The Portable Multi-Channel Sound System is a unique musical instrument designed specifically for Michael J. Schumacher’s spatialized compositions. It sets up in less than an hour and can be carried in a single suitcase, yet provides 12 fully discrete audio channels, complete with speakers, amplifiers and sound sources. The speakers are an assortment of small and tiny speakers, “naked” drivers and improvised resonators. They are essential in “filtering” the character of the sounds. 

Building on the pioneering work of composers such as Alvin Lucier and Maryanne Amacher, presentations explore the relationship between musical form and architectural space and how this relationship can inform listening. Combining installation and performance, algorithmic composition and improvisation, this goes beyond acoustics to the way people inhabit and use spaces, creating paradigms for listening and formal expectations. 

Kaffe Matthews has been performing live music featuring outcomes of The Ripley, an instrument designed and built by Martin Howse. The Ripley is occupied with the generation and processing of all colors of noise, designed through alchemical discoveries made by the British alchemist George Ripley in the 15th century. Noise, colors, lightning, square waves, vomited wings and feathers, mashed through clocks and salt and fed by mercury to feed the final output – the Toad? – the gold?

Bryan Eubanks has been working with the soprano saxophone, electronics of his own design, and computer music. He improvises, composes, and is developing sound installations exploring acoustic holography. 

Dina Maccabee (voice, live electronics, composition), Evelyn Saylor (voice, live electronics, composition), Johanna Ackva (voice) and Marco Wessnigk (voice)

Composer/vocalists Dina Maccabee and Evelyn Saylor perform new duo works for their voices and live electronics. They will also premiere pieces for a cappella vocal quartet together with Johanna Ackva and Marco Wessnigk. The program explores the composers’ shared engagement with modal harmony, looped and cyclical structures, interlocking rhythmic play, and communal singing practices.

Divide by Zero #4

Joanna Mattrey, solo viola

Ben Bennett & Axel Dörner, duo for percussion and trumpet

Joanna Mattrey is a composer, improviser, and multimedia artist whose works blend installation, video, sound, and movement and are often site-specific, using the space to create intimacy with the audience. Her compositions use multimedia elements to strengthen and extend the transmission of her work, creating visual and sonic environments that deeply convey the themes of transformation, memory, social connection, loss, and spiritual journeys. 

Ben Bennett has developed a unique approach to percussion that takes the lineage of free jazz, free improvisation, Berlin reductionism, and extended technique as its foundation. In searching for an expanded sonic palette and more fluid movement between various techniques, he distilled the drumset into a small collection of drumheads, stretched membranes, and other objects that offered a wide variety of unconventional sounds from very few materials and which could be rearranged into different combinations during a performance.  

Beyond his work with Monks Casino, Die Enttäuschung, and other bands, Axel Dörner has been pioneering extended trumpet techniques and new musical structures since the 1990s. Since 2000, he has been working together with Sukandar Kartadinata on the electronic extension of his music on the trumpet.

Entangled Sounds 2024 #2

Lisa Simpson aka Agente Costura, solo set for hacked sewing machines and soft electronics

Graham Dunning, solo set for turntables and electronics

Lisa Simpson’s project Agente Costura is a continuous building site for self-playing, oscillating, blinking, touch sensitive, light sensitive, talking, soft, found, stitched, glitched, and hacked instruments, acting and reacting in an ever fluctuating state of chaos.

Graham Dunning's work explores sound as texture, timbre and something tactile, drawing on bedroom production, tinkering and recycling found objects. This performance is an exploration of the extended turntable system, using mechanical rotation to trigger, generate and modify sound.

with kind support from INM Berlin e.V.

Arnold Dreyblatt & Horse Lords present three joint compositions based on their recent collaboration.

Arnold Dreyblatt (excited string bass), Andrew Bernstein (saxophone), Owen Gardner (guitar), Max Eilbacher (bass and computer) & Andrea Belfi (percussion) 

One of the second generation of New York minimal composers, Arnold Dreyblatt studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and media art with Woody and Steina Vasulka. His early activities in music and performance included the albums Nodal Excitation, Propellers In Love, The Sound of One String, and the opera project Who's Who in Central and East Europe 1933. Dreyblatt has invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. Often characterized as one of the more rock-oriented of American minimalists, Dreyblatt has cultivated a strong underground base of fans for his transcendental and ecstatic music as a solo artist and with his Orchestra of Excited Strings.

As an instrumental unit, Horse Lords rely on a collective voice and focus to provide the band’s core strength; a process enriched by their disparate musical interests. The quartet, formed in 2010, embraces Renaissance counterpoint, plays instruments specially fretted for microtonality, and organizes its music through polyrhythmic matrices. The ingenious machinery of their music is humanized with exploration and passion. 

with kind support from Musikfonds e.V.

Making Waves #2:  Stranger than Fiction

A screening of Larissa Sansour's sci-fi trilogy, followed by a discussion with Irit Neidhardt and Rabih El Khoury on the challenges of producing, promoting, and screening Arab/Palestinian films in the German context and the extreme censorship we are experiencing today.

Doors 20:00 / start 20:30 / entry by donation

Under the common themes of loss, belonging, heritage and national identity, Larissa Sansour's three films A Space Exodus (2008), Nation Estate (2012) and In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015) each explore different aspects of the political turmoil the Middle East. While A Space Exodus envisions the final uprootedness of the Palestinian experience and takes the current political predicament to its extra-terrestrial extreme by landing the first Palestinian on the moon, Nation Estate reveals a sinister account of an entire population restricted to a single skyscraper, with each Palestinian city confined to a single floor. In the trilogy’s final instalment, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, a narrative resistance leader engages in archaeological warfare in a desperate attempt to secure the future of her people. Using the language of sci-fi and glossy production, Sansour’s trilogy presents a dystopian vision of a Middle East on the brink of the apocalypse.

Matmos, four-channel electronics set  

Weston Olencki, the rocks are different here for electromechanical banjo 

Matmos is Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, auteurs in the world of electronic music and sampling culture whose very first album sampled highly unusual sound sources such as the amplified nerve tissue of crayfish. Ever since, they have made music out a wildly heterogeneous set of objects and sources, including the sound of the pages of bibles turning, water hitting copper plates, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, rat cages, tanks of helium, a cow uterus, human skulls, snails, cigarettes, cards shuffling, laser eye surgery, whoopee cushions, balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones, Polish trains, insects, life-support systems, inflatable blankets, rock salt, solid gold coins, the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun, a five-gallon bucket of oatmeal, snails interrupting the path of a laser and altering the pitch of a light sensitive theremin, a PVC police riot shield, silicon breast implants, and their own washing machine. 

These raw materials are manipulated into surprisingly accessible forms, and often supplemented by traditional musical instruments played by guest musicians from their circle of friends and collaborators. The result is a model of electronic composition as a relational network that connects sources and outcomes together; information about the process of creation activates the listening experience, providing the listener with entry points into sometimes densely allusive, baroque recordings that have the direct sensory immediacy of pop music. 

Weston Olencki's the rocks are different here presents a rush of polyrhythmic grooves that jaggedly flip and resuture themselves in a way similar to the early minimalist works of Philip Glass or Steve Reich. The composition reaches escape velocity from the mechanical permutations of its bluegrass role: it treats the banjo as an ecstatic array of strings and resonators rather than as an instrument strummed wistfully in the depths of some dark holler.  

Okkyung Lee (cello) performs in trio with Eunyoung Kim (piano) & Junyoung Song (drums), along with special guest Liz Kosack (keyboards).

Okkyung Lee has created a body of work blurring genre boundaries through collaborations and compositions while pushing the limitation of contemporary cello performance techniques. Her music draws from noise and extended techniques, jazz, Western classical, Korean traditional, and popular music.

Eunyoung Kim is a pianist, composer, and improviser. In 2018, she released her debut album titled Silent Child, as the leader of the KEY Trio presenting her original compositions. More recently, Earworm is her first solo piano album establishing her identity as an improviser.

Junyoung Song is a prolific drummer based working primarily in jazz and free improvisation. He has released two albums as a solo artist titled Solo and Solo Live, both showcasing his passion for unaccompanied drum music

Liz Kosack is a keyboardist and mask maker whose projects over recent years have included the KIM Collective, VAX (with Devin Gray and Patrick Breiner), RRR (with Dan Peter Sundland), The Liz (with Liz Allbee and Korhan Erel), **Y** (with Steve Heather and Sundland), SPOILER (with Julia Riedy, Brad Henkel, and Sam Hall), and Meow! (with Cansu Tanrikuku, Jim Black, and Sundland).

p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r. (Rosie Middleton, Sarah Parkin, Katherine Tinker & Helen Whitaker) perform works by Gunduz, Ingvarsson, Marino, Shlomowitz, and Walshe.

Jessie Marino performs the final chapter of her A Host of Possible Dramas and Exchanges, inspired by Ashley's Perfect Lives.

Program:

Jessie Marino, A Host of Possible Dramas and Exchanges (final chapter)

Helgi Ingvarsson, Random Notes I Found In The Street

Matthew Shlomowitz, Letter Piece #7: British Sign Language  

Esin Gunduz, A Sense of Energy 

Jennifer Walshe, EVERYTHING YOU OWN HAS BEEN TAKEN TO A DEPOT SOMEWHERE

Jessie Marino, Jesus Fucking Christ Linda, Jesus Fucking Christ

p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r. is an experimental performance group which creates rigorous and playful interpretations of innovative repertoire. They use a non-hierarchical collaborative practice to collectively form performances which explore choreographed movement, language and performativity. Their work is situated in and informed by their embodied experience as four women, and by their diverse artistic backgrounds (activism, composition, dance, opera, psychodynamic theory, virtuosity). Their interests include embodiment, consent and boundaries, gender theory and the environmental crisis. 

Jessie Marino is a composer, performer, and media artist. Her compositions and solo performances abstract ideas drawn from all stripes of popular culture and political discourse, girded by a definitively humanistic sensibility rife with equal doses of wit and pathos. Marino’s pieces score out sound, video, story, lighting, and staging, treating each of these elements as expandable musical materials. She transcends the conventional materials of composition to help audiences locate music in the most commonplace activities and relations. 

An open workshop on Ottoman classical makam and tanbur (19:00 to 20:00), followed by a panel discussion (20:00 to 21:00) and concert (21:00 to 22:00)

Workshop

An open workshop on Ottoman classical makam and tanbur led by Merve Salgar 

Panel discussion

Note Metaphors: Re-Learning Listening 

"Decolonization“ is not a question of simple programming, but rather of attentive listening, the attempt to perceive beyond the imprinting that has taken place (including indoctrination) and to learn anew again and again by listening. It is concrete work that needs to be done if we want to change and open up the concert hall and ourselves. (Elke Moltrecht, Bakr Khleifi, Margarete Huber, Merve Salgar, Jeremy Woodruff)

Concert

Works by Margarete Huber, Fulya Uçanok, Merve Salgar, and Claudio Monteverdi performed by Margarete Huber (soprano), Merve Salgar (tanbur), and Fulya Uçanok (piano)

Sonic Borderlines Festival 2024 presents music that integrates new playing techniques across cultural sound boundaries. Sound production, vocal and instrumental techniques are still largely unexplored in Western musical practice because of the immutability of our concept of notes (on paper) in this respect. Most non-European classical traditions are characterized by a more fluid, ornate and flexible sound of voices, instruments and rhythm. In Indian, Turkish and Arabic music, sound production is based less on the concept of notes on a page and more on, for example, swaras (region of sound) or naghmas (originally referring to both "modulation" and "singing“). 

with kind support from INM Berlin e.V. & Musikfonds

3 x 2:  Crosroads 2000

das Modern Song Kollektiv performs songs by three composers of the late 20th century, each paired with songs by their protégés from the 21st century: György Ligeti with Unsuk Chin, Henri Dutilleux with Kenneth Hesketh, and John Tavener with Judith Weir.

Program

György Ligeti, "Der Sommer" (1989)
Unsuk Chin, "Alice - Acrostic" (2004)
Henri Dutilleux, "San Francisco Night" (1963)
Kenneth Hesketh, "Shimmerwords and Idle Songs" ^ (2007) (German premiere)
John Tavener, "A Mini Song Cycle for Gina" (1984)
Judith Weir, "On the Palmy Beach" (2019)

Susanna Hurrell (soprano), Ariana Gibbard ^ (soprano), Simon Wallfisch (cello), Philip Headlam (piano)

Chris Pitsiokos performs Junk Prosthesis (2024) for laptop and prepared loudspeakers and Irrational Rhythms and Shifting Poles (2023) for alto saxophone, laptop, four loudspeakers and five light bulbs.

Chris Pitsiokos is a saxophonist, composer and improviser whose music falls under the umbrella of experimentalism, including noise, improvised music, experimental jazz, free jazz, noise rock, new music, minimal music, drone and art rock. As a soloist he has developed a unique voice on the alto saxophone, and his expansion of the instrument’s vocabulary has served to multiply its emotive and formal possibilities.  

Lights built by Amp-FX

This project made possible through the kind support of INM Berlin e.V.

Apparat+ continues its New Music for Brass series with a solo trombone set by sound artist TinTin Patrone, flanked by two works performed by Apparat: the premiere of Timothy McCormack's solo horn work CARRIER and an ensemble presentation of Charlie Sdraulig's works Ground and debris. 

Program:

TinTin Patrone, solo trombone

Tim McCormack, CARRIER (2024) for solo horn

Charlie Sdraulig, Ground (2022) for amplified trumpet and trombone, overlayed with debris (2022) for open instrumentation and electronics

Weston Olencki (trombone), Samuel Stoll (horn), Mathilde Conley (trumpet), Max Murray (tuba)

Tintin Patrone is captivated by the exploration of interconnections among music, art, sound, and experimental forms of expression. Her creative works revolve around the visual aspects of music and the ways in which personal and societal connections are established with it.

Timothy McCormack writes haptic, viscous music which makes audible the tactile, physical relationship between a performer and their instrument. Sometimes ecstatic, sometimes hermetic, their music embeds pitch within dense walls of noise to create strangely affecting sonic ecologies which alter one’s perception of time. Their music is also deeply engaged in contemporary queer aesthetics, including queer community-building, the sensation of submission, and the processing of incurable disease and its histories.

Intimacy, nuance, and quietude are the core themes of Charlie Sdraulig's creative practice. His work often draws attention to the social dynamics of musical situations, focusing on subtle sonic and gestural behaviours. His research encompasses writing upon social interaction and innovative notations in experimental sonic practices, as well as timbre perception.

with the kind support of INM Berlin e.V.

Toshimaru Nakamura, solo for no-input mixing board

Kjell Bjørgeengen & Kazuhisa Uchihashi, duo for guitar/daxophone and live video

Toshimaru Nakamura's instrument is the no-input mixing board, which describes a way of using a standard mixing board as an electronic music instrument, producing sound without any external audio input. The use of the mixing board in this manner is not only innovative in the sounds it can create but, more importantly, in the approach this method of working with the mixer demands.

Kjell Bjørgeengen's live works feature the production of flicker videos. The flicker is sound given video sync, thus becoming video and revealing the self-identity of the two. The flicker image is perhaps the most simple and fundamental image we can think of, the oscillation between shades of light and darkness, given from the outside as a simple binary pairing of the visual experience.

The flicker works can be harsh to watch, as they are perceived on a physical level. The black and white works are often perceived in colours. There is a threshold that needs to be overcome. A still image from the video reads like a minimal work; set in motion the work turns into its opposite. The art work, having all the traditional marks of the art-making process, turns into a phenomenon and touches the demarcation line between art and non-art.

Kazuhisa Uchihashi is a composer, electric guitar and daxophone player, and music producer. His signature instrument, the daxophone, is a creation of the late guitarist and inventor Hans Reichel, who was a creative partner of Uchihashi's. 

Our second night with Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board) focuses on Nakamura's work with small ensembles.

Program:

Toshimaru Nakamura & crys cole (objects, electronics)

Lost Jockey  Lucio Capece (soprano sax, compositions), Quentin Tolimieri (piano) & Burkhard Beins (drums)

Toshimaru Nakamura with Kjell Bjørgeengen (live video) & Kaffe Matthews (electronics)

Kjell Bjørgeengen's live works feature the production of flicker videos. The flicker is sound given video sync, thus becoming video and revealing the self-identity of the two. The flicker image is perhaps the most simple and fundamental image we can think of, the oscillation between shades of light and darkness, given from the outside as a simple binary pairing of the visual experience.

crys cole is sound artist who works in composition, performance, sound sculpture, and installation. Taking a conceptual approach, she generates subtle and imperfect sounds through haptic gestures and seemingly mundane materials to create texturally nuanced electro-acoustic works that continuously retune the ear. 

Lost Jockey was formed in 2020 by Lucio Capece (soprano sax), Quentin Tolimieri (piano), and Burkhard Beins (drums). The band seeks to create ambiguity in the perception of harmony, eschewing tradtional devices such as scales or changes.  

Kaffe Matthews is a music maker who works live with space, data, things, and place to make new electroacoustic composition. Site, accessibility and the physical experience of this music has always been central to her approach, she has also invented some unique interfaces—the sonic armchair, the sonic bed and a variety of sonic bikes—which enable new paths into composition for maker and ways in to listening for wide-ranging audiences. 

Toshimaru Nakamura's instrument is the no-input mixing board, which describes a way of using a standard mixing board as an electronic music instrument, producing sound without any external audio input. The use of the mixing board in this manner is not only innovative in the sounds it can create but, more importantly, in the approach this method of working with the mixer demands.