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).

Nils Ostendorf (trumpet), Fredrik Rasten (acoustic guitars) & Toma Gouband (percussion)

Weston Olencki & Laura Cocks, record release concert: Music for Two Flutes (Hideous Replica 2024)

With a high sensitivity for orchestration and compositional dramaturgy, the trio Ostendorf, Rasten & Gouband play music in long arcs, in which the handling of textures and states of suspension is a central theme.

Recorded in Brattleboro, Vermont in 2021, Music for Two Flutes features one piece each by Weston Olencki and Laura Cocks. Olencki's Ceol Meadhonach references the "middle music" of Highland bagpipe, which lies between Ceol Mor (the "big music") and Ceol Beag (the "little music" of quicksteps and dance music). Cocks's piece SLUB attempts to reconfigure the flute's scales and acoustic systems and submerge into the instabilities created thereby.

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.

A rare chance to hear this unique gamelan and percussion ensemble in an intimate chamber setting. 

Ensemble Nist-Nah 

Charles Dubois, Paula Escobar, Will Guthrie, Irina Leach, Sven Michel, Julien Ouvrard, Ellen Pelé, Lou Voisin

(gamelan, percussion, drums)

Ensemble Nist-Nah was formed in 2019 as a hybrid Gamelan / percussion ensemble, led by drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie. The music of Ensemble Nist-Nah is informed, influenced and inspired by traditional musics from Indonesia and gong-based musics from Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, the music aims to distance itself from dry academic discourse or questionable exoticism. Rather, sonic and interactive issues are placed at the forefront.

The Ensemble developed out of Guthrie’s extensive work with pitched percussion and resonant metals, using gongs, singing bowls and bells as melodic and harmonic material, alongside polyrhythmic / polymetric rhythmic possibilities. The music presented is grounded in Guthrie’s travels in Indonesia and appreciation of various forms of Gamelan music, from the stately suspended temporality of the courtly Javanese Gamelan Sekatan, to the delirious, thuggish repetition that accompanies the Javanese trance ritual Jathilan, to the shimmering acoustic glitch of contemporary Balinese composer Dewa Alit and his Gamelan Salukat. Though Guthrie is broadening his palette to explore Gamelan instrumentation and pay tribute to his love of this sophisticated yet elemental percussion music, the influences are rich and varied, taking into account Roscoe Mitchell’s percussion works, Henry Threadgill’s multi-directional improvisatory music, as well as cross-cultural adventures from the likes of Trevor Watts, Michael Ranta and Mike Cooper.

Bringing together eight musicians coming from eclectic and mixed backgrounds, Nist-Nah hosts a wealth of experience and expertise, and also regularly invites guests such as Jennifer Torrence, Sarah Hennies, Toma Gouband and Jessika Kenney. In 2024 the group enters into its second phase, bringing together younger Nantes-based musicians, a new group and new music to go with it. In parallel to Nist-Nah’s artistic endeavours, various members of the group regularily organise workshops and teach Gamelan, using these incredible instruments as a way to bring people together—old and young, beginner and advanced—and have taught in universities, prisons, squats, schools and community centres. 

Production by Studio D’En Haut, Nantes, France

A rare chance to hear this unique gamelan and percussion ensemble in an intimate chamber setting. 

Ensemble Nist-Nah 

Charles Dubois, Paula Escobar, Will Guthrie, Irina Leach, Sven Michel, Julien Ouvrard, Ellen Pelé, Lou Voisin

(gamelan, percussion, drums)

Ensemble Nist-Nah was formed in 2019 as a hybrid Gamelan / percussion ensemble, led by drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie. The music of Ensemble Nist-Nah is informed, influenced and inspired by traditional musics from Indonesia and gong-based musics from Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, the music aims to distance itself from dry academic discourse or questionable exoticism. Rather, sonic and interactive issues are placed at the forefront.

The Ensemble developed out of Guthrie’s extensive work with pitched percussion and resonant metals, using gongs, singing bowls and bells as melodic and harmonic material, alongside polyrhythmic / polymetric rhythmic possibilities. The music presented is grounded in Guthrie’s travels in Indonesia and appreciation of various forms of Gamelan music, from the stately suspended temporality of the courtly Javanese Gamelan Sekatan, to the delirious, thuggish repetition that accompanies the Javanese trance ritual Jathilan, to the shimmering acoustic glitch of contemporary Balinese composer Dewa Alit and his Gamelan Salukat. Though Guthrie is broadening his palette to explore Gamelan instrumentation and pay tribute to his love of this sophisticated yet elemental percussion music, the influences are rich and varied, taking into account Roscoe Mitchell’s percussion works, Henry Threadgill’s multi-directional improvisatory music, as well as cross-cultural adventures from the likes of Trevor Watts, Michael Ranta and Mike Cooper.

Bringing together eight musicians coming from eclectic and mixed backgrounds, Nist-Nah hosts a wealth of experience and expertise, and also regularly invites guests such as Jennifer Torrence, Sarah Hennies, Toma Gouband and Jessika Kenney. In 2024 the group enters into its second phase, bringing together younger Nantes-based musicians, a new group and new music to go with it. In parallel to Nist-Nah’s artistic endeavours, various members of the group regularily organise workshops and teach Gamelan, using these incredible instruments as a way to bring people together—old and young, beginner and advanced—and have taught in universities, prisons, squats, schools and community centres. 

Production by Studio D’En Haut, Nantes, France

The Harmonic Space Orchestra's Prime Time series continues with Cosmic Winds, an evening of new microtonal music for mixed wind sextet. With a focus on rational tuning, spectralism, and interactive electronics, this music reveals a wide world of colors that can only be unlocked through the power of vibrating air columns.

Cosmic Winds 

Michiko Ogawa, Fragment One

Weston Olencki, It Began to Rain and So Did I

Sam Dunscombe, Fifth Study in Mass Plasma Synthesis

Rebecca Lane, Flowers of Sky

M.O. Abbott, Birefringence

Ellen Arkbro, Nightclouds

Rebecca Lane (flutes), Sam Dunscombe (clarinets), Michiko Ogawa (clarinets), Ellen Arkbro (trumpet), M.O. Abbott (trombone), Weston Olencki (trombone)

Ellen Arkbro, Standard Selected Collections

Ellen Arkbro presents her work with sustained tones distributed as space and time through precise just-intonation tuning. In Selected Collections, Arkbro works with full-spectrum harmonic textures using phase-locked sound synthesis, while Standard is a simple traversal of slow melodies extended through chordal space. 

Ellen Arkbro is a composer from Stockholm currently living and working in Berlin. She works with precision-tuned intervallic harmony for acoustic instruments and synthetic sound, and focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.

Madison Greenstone, SILENT PARADOX OF EXPRESSION for solo clarinet 

Lea Bertucci, solo woodwinds & electronics 

Madison Greenstone's SILENT PARADOX OF EXPRESSION is a lyrical expansion drawing on the solo and harmonic language of the exstatic resonances for clarinet. Florid ornamentation gives rise to dense spatial counterpoint; cacophonous silences punctuate these harmonically rich tessellations; ringing-clashing bells invoke phantom emergences at the brink of what's bearable. How closely can one be present to the inner variance of a moment? SILENT PARADOX OF EXPRESSION invokes this question through the spiritual nature of breath––life––turned to sound.

Lea Bertucci's 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.

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024 

Maya Bennardo, summer rustlings (2024) for solo violin

Kari Watson & Katinka Kleijn, duo for cello & electronics

Maya Bennardo is a founding member of the violin/viola duo andPlay and 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.  

Kari Watson and Katinka Kleijn bring together a wide range of sounds, merging acoustic, analog, and digital sound sources and exploring extended aspects of improvisation such as physicality, attunement, and embodiment. By combining cello, modular eurorack synthesizer, Max MSP, and handheld electronics, the two create tactile performance environments for their audiences.

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024 

Entangled Sounds 2024 #3

Ioana Vreme Moser, Coquetta for electronic instruments and makeup

DinahBird, solo set for gramophones and field recordings

Sound artist Ioana Vreme Moser uses electronic hardware, speculative research, and tactile experiments to create different sound materialities. Her works reveal personal observations on the history of the development of electronics, including its production chains and fallow areas (and thus entanglements) with the environment. In her solo set, she presents a current version of Coquetta, her glamorous ultra-femme alter ego. Expect luscious-looking, self-built electronic instruments, altered symbiotically with substances and control voltages, reflecting the artist’s current research into minerals and their crystallography.

DinahBird is a sound and radio artist whose artistic practice questions aspects of diffusion, transmission, and memory. Her work focuses on radio waves, electronic sounds from forgotten synthesizers, and sounds from rare or obsolete recording media such as magnetic tapes and Pyral discs. In her current project with specially produced shellac records, she pursues an eco-sonic approach. Her starting point is the study of shellac, a natural resin secreted by microscopic insects in the forests of India and Thailand that was one of the main components of the 78 rpm disc for decades—until the environmentally harmful vinyl was introduced. 

Entangled Sounds is a series organized by Karin Weissenbrunner to explore object-specific sounds, resonant bodies and (meta-)mechanical motion, featuring performers using self-made instruments or materialities of audio/media reproduction.

with kind support from INM Berlin e.V.

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024

Divide by Zero #5

Ángeles Rojas, fragile harmony (2023) for 20 balloons and harmonicas 

Elena Kakaliagou & Peter Meyer, duo for horn and prepared guitar with live processing

Ángeles Rojas is a composer whose practice is centered on the listening experience as a sensitive means to inhabit other perceptions of time and space. In her music she explores the concept of unity through deepening into the harmonic spectrum and the resonance phenomena. 

New sounds by Elena Kakaliagou on French horn and Peter Meyer on (mostly) prepared guitar and sound processing: improvised, extended, processed, re-imagined, scattered, re-built. 

Divide by Zero is a monthly concert series organized by composer and bassist Nick Dunston.

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik

John McCowen & Madison Greenstone (BBb contrabass clarinets) perform McCowen's Mundanas.

Departure Duo perform Haukur Þór Harðarson’s Poems for the Fire and Tomás Gueglio's Murmelszenen.

John McCowen & Madison Greenstone perform at the height of ensemble entanglement, operating as a singular organism. Their recording of McCowen's Mundanas has a unified aura from beginning to end—variations on a theme—silence to culmination and back. The music is more akin to rolling waves of tectonic activity than to McCowen’s more strident works.  

In 2021, John McCowen was recording demos for Mundanas Vol. 2 in his basement studio with the goal of recording each part in one circular-breathed take. This proved impossible due to an onslaught of earthquakes preceding the Fagradalsfjall volcanic eruption of March 2021 near his home in Reykjavík, Iceland. For weeks leading up to the eruption, there was a persistent pulse of earthquakes—sometimes only minutes apart. At first, from silence, there would appear an incredibly low, sine-like tone. As this tone began to crescendo, it would be accompanied by an ever-increasing vibration that would then become visceral as the building shook. For John, feeling these rolling vibrations unconsciously shaped the music of Mundanas Vol. 2.

Departure Duo (soprano Nina Guo & bassist Eddie Kass) is committed to performing and commissioning repertoire for their high/low combination and has premiered dozens of new works resulting from in-depth collaborations, including commissions from Katherine Balch, Sarah Gibson, and Mikhail Johnson. In addition to performing, Departure Duo has cataloged over 170 pieces as part of their “30x’30” project, with the goal of finding 30 hours of soprano and double bass repertoire by 2030. Two such commissions will be performed tonight: Haukur Þór Harðarson’s Poems for the Fire and Tomás Gueglio's Murmelszenen.

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik

The Contest of Pleasures  John Butcher (saxophone), Axel Dörner (trumpet) & Xavier Charles (clarinet) celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Contest of Pleasures on opening night of the John Butcher Berlin Residency. Formed at the suggestion of Xavier Charles to play the 1999 Musique Action in Vandoeuvrve, the influential trio has gone on to release The Contest of Pleasures (Potlatch 2001), Albi (Potlatch 2006), and Tempestuous (Another Timbre 2007).

Magda Mayas & John Butcher  Magda Mayas began performing with John Butcher in 2010 as part of the trio Vellum (with Tony Buck), another durable formation that can be heard on Plume (Unsounds 2021) and glints (Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu 2022).

John Butcher is a saxophonist, improviser and composer who has played a key role in shaping the history of improvised European music since the mid-1980s. The John Butcher Berlin Residency marks the 70th birthday of this exceptional musician, meanwhile focusing on his special relationship to the Berlin scene.

Funded by Musikfonds und Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024

Tony Buck & John Butcher  Tony Buck (drums) and John Butcher (saxophone) perform as a duo, departing from their usual trio format as Vellum (with Magda Mayas) or Butcher-Stangl-Buck (with Burkhard Stangl).

Liz Allbee, Emilio Gordoa & John Butcher  Liz Allbee (trumpet) and Emilio Gordoa (vibraphone, percussion)—Berlin colleagues who have performed together in countless improvising formations as well as in Splitter Orchester—form a first-time trio with John Butcher.

John Butcher is a saxophonist, improviser and composer who has played a key role in shaping the history of improvised European music since the mid-1980s. The John Butcher Berlin Residency marks the 70th birthday of this exceptional musician, meanwhile focusing on his special relationship to the Berlin scene.

Funded by Musikfonds und Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024

Angharad Davies & John Butcher  John Butcher (saxophone) caps his Berlin Residency with his third duo in three nights, this time with long-time collaborator Angharad Davies (violin).

Andrea Neumann, Burkhard Beins, Werner Dafeldecker & John Butcher  John Butcher first performed with Burkhard Beins and Werner Dafeldecker as a trio at KM28 in 2019, a performance captured on the live album Induction (Ni Vu Ni Connu, 2021). Beins & Dafeldecker recently celebrated 30 years together as members of Polwechsel and are tonight joined by composer, improviser and pianist Andrea Neumann.

John Butcher is a saxophonist, improviser and composer who has played a key role in shaping the history of improvised European music since the mid-1980s. The John Butcher Berlin Residency marks the 70th birthday of this exceptional musician, meanwhile focusing on his special relationship to the Berlin scene.

Funded by Musikfonds und Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024

Jérôme Noetinger & dieb13, duo for reel-to-reel tape and turntables

Jérôme Noetinger is a composer, improviser, and sound artist who works with electroacoustic devices such as the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder and magnetic tape, analog synthesizers, mixing desks, speakers, microphones, various household electronics and everyday objects and home-made electronica.

dieb13 (Dieter Kovačič) is a turntablist, hacker, filmmaker, autodidact, composer, collageur, and conscientious copyright objector. He has long explored the possibilities of vinyl, casettes, hard disks, and IP protocols as material for collages and compositions. Using extended playing techniques and his own lathe cutter, he has pushed the development of turntables as an instrument. Also performs under the names Takeshi Fumimoto, Echelon, Dieter Bohlen, and dieb14.

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024

Dylan Kerr, Substratum for voice & electronics

Anna Clementi, solo voice, Intonarumori loops & electronics

Dylan Kerr is a performance artist and vocalist based between Ireland and Berlin. They work within process composition, just intonation, and improvisation, combining their voice and instruments with various electro-acoustic methods. Their work is informed by their research into sacred music and extended vocal techniques.

Anna Clementi sees herself as an “actress of the voice” rather than exclusively as a singer. In this way she also articulates the diversity of her artistic expression, with which she is always searching for new connections between voice, gesture, language, dance, and theater. Clementi loves the combination of play, lightness, and irony and is constantly looking for new means of expression that she can unfold with her versatile voice. 

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024

Making Waves #4

A conversation with Eyal Weizman and Yasmeen Daher, with a screening of Mohamad Malas's short film Quneitra 74.

Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where in 2005 the founded the Centre for Research Architecture. In 2007, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, he established the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. He is the author of numerous books, including Hollow Land, The Least of all Possible Evils, Investigative Aesthetics, The Roundabout Revolutions, The Conflict Shoreline, FORENSIS, and Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and is on the board of directors of the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ).

Yasmeen Daher is a feminist activist and a writer. She has taught at institutions including Bir-Zeit University in Palestine and Simone de Beavour Institute in Canada and is currently co-director and editorial director of Febrayer: A Network for Independent Arab Media Organizations, based in Berlin. 

Quneitra 74 is shown courtesy of mec film.  

Apparat+ presents three new works by Jessie Marino for solo performer, low brass duo, and guitar and a new work by Max Eilbacher for multichannel synthesis and low brass duo.

Program:

Max Eilbacher, Wall in 3 Parts for electronics and brass

Jessie Marino, Seahorses for performer, electric guitar, and brass 

Jessie Marino, Slow Blink for performer and brass 

Jessie Marino, New Renaissance for performer and brass

Max Eilbacher (electronics), Owen Gardner (electric guitar), Jessie Marino (performance), Max Murray (tuba) & Weston Olencki (trombone) 

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.

Max Eilbacher works with sound. That work materializes in a variety of forms: compositions, musical performances, conceptual systems, perceptual choreography, installations, and theoretical sculpture.

Apparat is a brass ensemble focused on expanding the horizons of brass instruments in the context of new music and sound art. 

with support from inm berlin e.V.

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024

Flare Gun Hour performs Shrink and Peep and Strain, a "KOPFKINO" work featuring an interplay of text projected as film and composed and improvised music. A curiously visual effect sprung from the audience’s private imaginations.

Ruby Bilger (text), Fabiana Striffler (violin), Johannes Schleiermacher (flute, saxophone, synthesizer) & Jörg Hochapfel (piano, melodica, synthesizer)

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024

Ira Hadžić (gong) & Cedrik Fermont (gong & electronics) 

Sarmen Almond, voice & electronics

Ira Hadžić & Cedrik Fermont play acoustic gongs as well as live-processed gongs with additional field recordings. They create quiet music with subtle dynamics. Deep listening, so to speak. In 2024, they released the album Kenopsia, a name derived from the Ancient Greek κενό (emptiness) + -οψία (seeing).

Sarmen Almond uses the voice and its relationship with electronic media to create compositions and decomposition of the personality on stage. Almond makes use of free improvisation, extended vocal techniques, programming and body work to explore the infinite vocal possibilities that the human body utters as instrument, as well as the reflection of these sounds in physical and imaginary spaces.  

Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik 2024

To mark the birthday of the recently passed Phill Niblock, Seth Josel presents the German premiere of Niblock's Stosspeng and a new work by Marguerite Brown. 

Program

Phill Niblock, Stosspeng for electric guitar, electric bass and fixed media (2006-07)

Marguerite Brown, quiver/quiver for button accordion & electric guitar (2024) 

Seth Josel (electric guitar), Christine Paté (accordion), Caleb Salgado (electric bass)

Entangled Sounds 2024 #4

Billy Roisz, solo set for video monitor, turntable, electric bass, electronics

Martin Howse, solo set for smoke, light, radio waves and electronics

Billy Roisz is a musician and filmmaker whose work stems from Vienna's extremely open DIY environment of the digital and analog electronic and noise scene from the 2000s on. Her artistic work ranges from the cinematic to pure audio works. Her first solo release Walking The Monkey dates back to 2012 (Editions Mego), and in 2023 she released her followup Bajo on Ventil Records. The aesthetics of image and sound glitches, such as feedback and distortion, are central to her sense of experimentation. Chiseled frequencies mingle with crackling soundscapes and granular image noise with throbbing pulses and restless rhythms.

Martin Howse is occupied with the links between the earth (geological and geophysical phenomena), software, and the a/human psyche (psychogeophysics) through the construction of experimental situations (performance, laboratories, walks, and workshops), material art works, instruments, fictions, texts, and software. His current project Orphans and voids, remains as a headless divination for obscure Eurorack assemblages (ERD/TOAD, caput draconis, and all the colors of the noise) for scattered concrete modules, including dismembered macros, printed-circuit incense clocks, micro-pulsed lasers, dusty CPUs, and ill-programmed, ill-abstracted, ill-simulated neurons.

with kind support from INM Berlin e.V. 

Raven Chacon, solo set for tapes, field recordings & electronics 

Michael Winter, Remembering Clive Wearing (2017) an installation-opera

Raven Chacon is a composer of chamber music, performer of experimental noise music, and installation artist. Chacon’s work explores sounds of acoustic handmade instruments overdriven through electric systems and the direct and indirect audio feedback responses from their interactions. His compositions are written for a variety of ensembles, musicians and non-musicians, and for social and educational situations. Chacon is also a member of the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity, founded in 2007, which premiered the two-mile land art/border intervention, Repellent Fence, in 2015. 

Michael Winter's Remembering Clive Wearing is an installation-opera that sets entries from the journal of Clive Wearing, an acclaimed musician and musicologist who suffered from one of the worst known cases of amnesia after contracting herpes encephalitis. At intervals prescribed by the journal itself, entries are read and accompanied by a sonic and visual flickering / flourish of activity using recordings of Orlando de Lassus’ nine Lamentationes Hieremiae Prophetae (as Wearing was an expert in the music of Lassus), sustained noises and tones, as well as lights.  

Divide by Zero #6

Cassie Kinoshi (saxophone, electronics), Nick Dunston (double bass), James Banner (double bass) & Bex Burch (percussion, electronics)

Heidi Heidelberg (vocals, guitar, loops), Mauricio Velasierra (quenas, mozhenos, electronics, loops) & Beatdenker (synth guitar, sampler)

Harmonic Space Orchestra performs works by Elsie Hamilton, Yves Klein, and HSO.

Program:

Elsie Hamilton, Natur Stimmung (ca. 1919)

Elsie Hamilton, Poor little human being. Little child of Time! (ca. 1917)

Elsie Hamilton, Finnish folk songs (transcribed into just intonation)

Yves Klein, Monotone Symphony (1947-1961)

Yves Klein, Monotone-Silence Symphony (1947-1961)

HSO, Monotone-expansion (2023)

MO Abbott (trombone), Ellen Arkbro (trumpet), Sam Dunscombe (clarinet), Judith Hamann (cello), Jon Heilbron (double bass), Rebecca Lane (flute), Thomas Nicholson (viola), Michiko Ogawa (clarinet), Marc Sabat (violin)

Multiplex #1 

Multiplex is a new series dedicated to showing experimental and artists' films, readings, and performances.

Zachary Epcar, The Canyon (2021), 16 mm on video

A portrait of the urban residential development as it slips into oblivion.

Adrienne Herr, Fictional (2024) and Pale Blue Dot Drowning (2024), solo performances for voice                                     Using vocal techniques to split and extend language, these new works focus on sound as the theater of meaning. Both performances variously push everyday, hyper-politicized language towards some material pivot.

Hangil Jang, In the Absence of, audio-visual performance                                                                                                             In the Absence of appropriates a well-known passage from John Cage about his experience in an anechoic chamber, which is modified through feedback and silent articulation. 

Daria Martin, Sensorium Tests (2012), 16 mm film

Within a scientific laboratory, subjective perceptions take center stage. A woman is measured for her capacity to respond to sensory stimuli while two researchers, hidden behind a one way mirror, look on. 

Nowhere Street #22

Christian Wallumrød (piano) and Ivar Grydeland (pedal steel guitar) 

Christian Wallumrød has worked as a musician and composer since 1992. Following his debut on ECM Records (No Birch, 1996), he has released a string of albums with Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, also on ECM. Their record Outstairs was rewarded with the Norwegian Grammy (Spellemannsprisen 2013). Wallumrød also focuses on improvisation via another longstanding collaboration, the French/Norwegian group Dans Les Arbres, also with two releases on ECM.  

Ivar Grydeland plays the electric and acoustic guitar, banjo, pedal steel guitar, and various electronics and chiefly performs in the realm of contemporary improvised music. Grydeland’s main groups are Huntsville and Dans les arbres (with Christian Wallumrød & Xavier Charles).

Rubbish Music, duo for discarded objects

Peter Strickmann, solo for ceramophon, objects & feedback

Rubbish Music is the duo of sound artists Kate Carr and Iain Chambers. They use worn-out treasures, empty vessels and broken devices as an orchestra of vivid musique concrète materials, creating "an experience that is visually and sonically mesmerising" (Wire Magazine). In 2022, their album Upcycling was released to critical acclaim on the Flaming Pines label.   

Peter Strickmann aims to reveal and reward the multiple listening habits that evolve from daily routine and sudden surprise. He creates lo-fi kinetic arrangements for exhibitions and employs a set of found objects, custom-built wind instruments, percussion tools, and feedback manipulation.

Carl Stone, solo electronics set

Liz Allbee & Carl Stone, duo for trumpet & electronics

Carl Stone, one of the pioneers of live computer music, has used computers in live performance since 1986. He has been hailed by The Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. 

Liz Allbee is a composer-performer and improviser who works with the imaginarchic potential of sonic material. She performs most often on self-designed quadraphonic trumpet, electronics, trumpet, and voice. Her work encompasses electro-acoustic composition, spatialization, improvisational strategies and instrument creation, with an ear towards embodiment and extension. 

Anthony Pateras & Anthony Burr, duo for piano, clarinet & electronics, with solo sets for piano and clarinet

Pateras & Burr worked together closely in 2014 and 2015, culminating in the release of The Long Exhale (Immediata 2016), featuring Pateras on prepared piano and Burr on clarinet and ARP 2600.

Anthony Pateras is a composer, pianist, and electroacoustic musician active whose practice spans concert works, piano performance, acousmatic diffusion, film soundtrack, psychoacoustic experiments, and percussion ensemble. He is also a member of the bands Sulla Lingua & PIVIXKI. Having cultivated singular languages in the Pateras/Baxter/Brown & North of North trios, he remains committed to piano improvisation as a method of assimilating instrumental practice with compositional thought. His electronic work traverses multiple rhythmic disciplines in an effort to synthesize polyrithmia with timbral otherness.

Anthony Burr is a foremost exponent of contemporary music, presenting solo clarinet works in collaboration with Alvin Lucier, Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough, and Magnus Lindberg. He has also worked widely outside the classical arena with artists including Jim O'Rourke, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Mark Feldman, Chris Speed, Jim Black, Ikue Mori, Tim Barnes, Alan Licht, and Mark Dresser. Ongoing collaborations include a duo with Skuli Sverrisson, The Clarinets (with Chris Speed and Oscar Noriega), a series of recordings with cellist Charles Curtis, and live film/music performances with Jennifer Reeves. As a composer he has specialized in epic-scale mixed media pieces, most notably Biospheria: An Environmental Opera, created with artist Steve Ausbury.

Making Waves #5

Dareen Tatour, My Threatening Poem 

A staged reading by Lamis Ammar (in German/Arabic with English subtitles), followed by a discussion led by Jara Nassar (in English). 

My Threatening Poem is Dareen Tatour's autobiographical reflection on her experiences with arrest and imprisonment by the Israeli authorities. The Palestinian poet was arrested in the fall of 2015, initially unaware of the reason for her detention. Judges interpreted her art and questioned her suitability as a poet. Tatour was sentenced to five months in prison and spent three years under house arrest, repeatedly appearing in court. 

Tatour's case attracted international attention, and the organization PEN advocated strongly for her release. Her text recounts her experiences with intimidation and dehumanization, as well as solidarity and resilience. It reveals the mechanisms of persecution and raises questions about the role of art in the struggle for freedom and self-empowerment.

My Threatening Poem has been performed in numerous cities, including Nazareth, Jaffa, Östersund, Paris, Brussels, Florence, Washington D.C., and Oslo. The German premiere was scheduled to take place on November 13, 2023 at TD Berlin but was cancelled. It has since been performed as part of Festivalla at Berlin's Volksbühne in July 2024.

Dareen Tatour is a Palestinian poet, playwright, photographer, and political, feminist, and social media activist. She completed studies in engineering, programming, media, and film direction. Through her writings and photography, Tatour seeks to address the injustices faced by Palestinians. She particularly encourages Palestinian women to speak out about their experiences of abuse and human rights violations.

Lamis Ammar studied theater and acting at the University of Haifa. During her studies, she worked at the Freedom Theatre in Jenin (Palestine) and acted in different plays and films in Palestine. She writes her own texts and has created video installations for galleries in Haifa. Additionally, she was an ensemble member in Yael Ronen's Third Generation – Next Generation at Gorki Theater in Berlin and performed in Helge Schmidt's Dat Leven vun de Liven at the Lichthof Theater in Hamburg. 

Jara Nassar is a writer and performer based in Berlin. She writes on topics of belonging, decolonial narratives, and queer futures as well as the resilient present. 

Maria Beraldo & Mariá Portugal, duo for clarinet, percussion & voice

Maria Beraldo is a performer and composer on the Brazilian music scene, performing with Arrigo Barnabé, Elza Soares, Negro Leo, Rodrigo Campos, and Laura Diaz, and a member of Quartabê (with Joanna Queiroz, Chicão, and Mariá Portugal). Her deubt album as a soloist was Cavala (Risco 2018), followed by the recent release of Colinho (Risco 2024). 

Mariá Portugal is a drummer, singer, composer, musical producer and improviser. Among her main projects is the Brazilian instrumental group Quartabê, which is currently promoting their third album. As a composer, she creates original music for dance, theater, and cinema, including the score for Manuela Martelli's acclaimed film 1976, which premiered at Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes 2022

The Dogmatics 

Chris Abrahams (piano) & Kai Fagaschinski (clarinet) 

Chris Abrahams and Kai Fagaschinski began collaborating in  a friend's piano-armed kitchen in 2007. While Chris is best known for his distinctive, repetitive piano playing as a member of The Necks, Kai has focused in recent years more on “compositional” projects like The International Nothing and The Magic I.D.  Within their duo Chris and Kai take a bit of an off-road ride, and their approach here is rather open and improvised, without much of a hidden conceptual motive.  In 2012 they released The Sacrifice For The Music Became Our Lifestyle, followed by 2018's Chop Off the Tops.

Entangled Sounds #5

dj sniff, solo set for turntables

Ignaz Schick, solo set for objects & motors

 
dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit) is a musician and curator in the field of experimental electronic arts. His work builds upon a distinct practice that combines DJing, instrument design, and free improvisation. He is also a music technology researcher. Over the years, he has collaborated with Evan Parker, Otomo Yoshihide, Tarek Atoui, and Senyawa. His recent works examine the critical roles that phonograph records played during WWⅡ Japan and its colonized territories. dj sniff’s Turntable improvisations reflect a longstanding practice that merges influences from experimental music, hip hop, and free improvisation through the use of self-built instruments.

Ignaz Schick is a sound artist, composer, concept, and visual artist. He also performs as an instrumentalist on turntables, objects, live-electronics, alto/baritone saxophone, and flutes. For his solo set at KM28, he explores the sound-producing power of vibrations generated by low-frequency oscillations with loudspeaker membranes and small mobile phone motors. By controlling the speed of 8 to 16 motors, the artist scans various objects for their resonant frequencies (paper cups, straws, cans, etc.), some of which come from his rotating surfaces series. 

Entangled Sounds is a series organized by Karin Weissenbrunner to explore object-specific sounds, resonant bodies and (meta-)mechanical motion, featuring performers using self-made instruments or materialities of audio/media devices.

with kind support from INM Berlin e.V.

Fay Victor (voice), Tobias Delius (tenor saxophone, clarinet), Rebekah Heller (bassoon), Achim Kaufmann (piano) & Sofia Borges (drums, percussion) 

Fay Victor visits Berlin to perform in her Herbie Nichols SUNG project and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) residency at HKW. For tonight's concert she teams up with ICE director and basoonist Rebekah Heller and some of Berlin's punchiest improvisers: Tobias Delius, Achim Kaufmann, and Sofia Borges.

Lucie Vítková/Luc Vitk performs two recent solo pieces, Moonwalker and Water Vision, and a duo with Clementine.

Moonwalker is a new piece for one cyborg performer, moving and sounding, using mirror masks and lights, accompanied by feedback, balloon, voice, and synthesizer. The movement is determined by both the light reflection in the space and by the sound. The piece comes from an environment and reflects the relationships between all included media, participants, and architecture.

Lucie Vítková/Luc Vitk is a composer, improviser and performer (accordion, drums, hichiriki, synthesizer, harmonica, voice and dance) from the Czech Republic, living in New York. Their compositions focus on sonification, while in their improvisation practice Luc/ie works with characteristics of discrete spaces through the interaction between sound and movement. In Luc/ie’s recent work, they are interested in the social-political aspects of music in relation to everyday life and in reusing materials to build sonic costumes.

Clementine is an Asian American pianist and New York native, with more than 20 years of experience performing, writing, and improvising music. She draws on physical gestures and melodies to craft vibrant compositions. She finds salvation, in a world increasingly hostile to permanence, in the mercurial and androgynous.

Adrián de Alfonso presents his new album Viator, for voice and collective radio diffusion. (Most of the music played during this performance will be via FM transmission, so attendees are encouraged to bring their own portable FM radios to create a more playful and richer diffusion.)

Siri Salminen & André Vida, duo performance

Adrián de Alfonso, formerly known as Don The Tiger, is a musician opening a dialogue between places and the collective FM radio diffusion possible in them. His performances transfigure sources such as flamenco, copla, bolero, tango or sardana through unhinged sampling/midi techniques, stripped-down chanting, musique concrète outbursts and outlandish operatic procedures.  

Siri Salminen is a dancer, choreographer, and dance pedagogue working in the field of choreography and free improvisation, with a technical background in flamenco dance. Her main artistic interest lies in aspects of rhythm and absurdity, and in the expansion of the boundaries between sound and movement. Recordings of her footwork can be heard on Adrián de Alfonso's new album Viator.

André Vida is a saxophonist, lyricist, avant-garde musician, and experimental composer. Vida has been at the forefront of several major developments in experimental music, including his membership in Anthony Braxton’s original Ghost Trance Ensemble, and New York collective the CTIA and performances with The Tower Recordings and subsequent "freak folk" groups. 

A night of architectural timbres performed in memory of Ernstalbrecht Stiebler (1934–2024)

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler was greatly influenced by Giacinto Scelsi's works and, during his working life at Hessicher Rundfunk, helped produce many of Scelsi's orchestral pieces. Tonight's performances explore how both of their concepts of resonance and klang pointed towards harmonic space. 

Program:

Stiebler, recent solos for piano (2022-24)

Scelsi, Quattro Illustrazioni for piano (1953) (selected movements) 

Stiebler, Quart, for piano (1998)               

Scelsi, Maknongan, for double bass (1976)

Stiebler & Kerr, recording from a piano & voice improvisation (2022)

Scelsi, Wo Ma (Mvt II) for bass voice (1960)

Stiebler, kleines DUO, for quarter-tone bass flute and quarter-tone keyboard

Scelsi, Tre Pezzi, for trombone (1956)

Steibler, Monodien, for five players (1976)

Jon Heilbron (double bass), Joe Houston (piano), Dylan Kerr (voice), Rebecca Lane (flutes), Weston Olencki (trombone)

Making Waves #6

A Song for Esther, a performative lecture by Candice Breitz, followed by a discussion between Breitz and Bani Abidi. The evening will be in English.

A Song for Esther explores implicated subjectivity, strategies of resistance, modes of solidarity and Germany’s ongoing inability to reckon with progressive Jewish thinkers, all in the form of a tribute to the late, great Esther Bejarano. Esther was born to a Jewish family in Saarland in 1924, exactly a century before an exhibition of Breitz’s work was cancelled by the Saarlandmuseum on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitism. During her early years, Esther’s family lived on the very square on which the Saarlandmuseum is located today.

After surviving both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, Esther emigrated to what was then Palestine, only to return to Germany in 1960, partially out of disgust with Israel’s policies towards Palestinians, which she viewed as "racist" and "catastrophic." Well into her nineties, she was a staunch activist against fascism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism. In addition to being an outspoken critic of Germany’s migration policies and a champion of refugee rights, Bejarano was openly supportive of the BDS movement, as a result of which she was — in her later years — stigmatised as an antisemite in Germany (by the descendants of those who tried and failed to murder her during the Nazi era).

Candice Breitz is a Berlin-based South African artist, who has exhibited her work internationally since 1994.

Bani Abidi is a Pakistani artist living in Berlin. She works with video, photography and drawing and exhibits internationally.

Joseph Houston plays Bryn Harrison's Vessels for solo piano

Felicity Mangan, solo electronics set

Joseph Houston's is a pianist and composer who is particularly interested in works that reassess the traditional composer-performer-listener triangle; make use of alternative keyboard instruments (synths, harmonium, harpsichord etc.); and intensely explore the sonic capabilities of the piano.

Felicity Mangan is a sound artist and composer. In different situations such as solo performances, site-specific, or collaborative interdisciplinary projects, Felicity samples and plays her field recording archive and found sounds to create quasi-bioacoustic music. 

Bryn Harrison has a long-held fascination with notions of musical time. Many of his works such as Surface Forms (repeating) (2009) operate at a speed and density that cannot be easily or immediately apprehended; they gradually draw the listener into an experience of the passage of time. More recently, he has continued to work with cyclical structures in a series of compositions of long duration that includes the 45-minute ensemble works Repetitions in Extended Time (2008) and Receiving the Approaching Memory (2014), and the 76-minute solo piano piece Vessels (2013). 

Marc Matter & Manuel Pessoa de Lima, Ververwandlung (Kafka-Beats) for voice and sampler

Jasmina Al-Qaisi, swimming in a huge watermelon ran by seeds, a food poem for text, voice, field recordings

To mark the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka's death, Marc Matter & Manuel Pessoa de Lima approach Kafka's Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) in an experimental sonic way. A selection of individual, frequently occurring words from Kafka's novella are fragmented, serially combined, and superimposed so that the language is transformed into music. Not only the transformation of writing into sound, of words into repetitive rhythms and textures, but also the transformation of meaning and linguistic structures, of prose into fragments, as well as the successive transformation of acoustic text material through repetition, follows the idea of metamorphosis. 

In swimming in a huge watermelon ran by seeds, Jasmina Al-Qaisi deals with various wetlands such as peatland, swamp, marsh, bog as transition areas from dry to permanently wet ecosystems, with biotopes of the past and future, and with her own memories that are nourished by oral tradition and translation. Most recently Jasmina has focused on wetlands and imaginaries built around them with a focus on the Danube Delta and various peatlands. 

Members of Harmonic Space Orchestra present a program of works in just intonation exploring precisely tuned harmony as an object of speculation. In recognition of James Tenney’s concept of harmonic space, the ensemble celebrates the late American composer’s 90th birthday with a rendering of one of his Postal Pieces from 1971.

Additionally, the ensemble reflects on the work of under-recognized Australian composer Elsie Hamilton, who led the earliest known collective practice of just intonation performance and composition in the 20th century. As early as 1916, Hamilton dedicated her work to a system of subharmonic modes conceived by musical archaeologist and close collaborator Kathleen Schlesinger, speculating their existence in relation to the modes and planetary cycle of Ancient Greece.

Contemporary perspectives on just intonation composed specifically for the group in 2023 by members Ellen Arkbro and Thomas Nicholson complete the program, investigating group-based resonance through harmonic fusion and roughness.

Program:

• Elsie Hamilton (arr. Rebecca Lane and Thomas Nicholson), Poor little human being. Little child of Time! (from Sensa) (1917) 

• James Tenney (interp. by HSO), For Percussion Perhaps, Or… (night) (from Postal Pieces) (1971) 

• Ellen Arkbro, Night and Day (2023) 

• Thomas Nicholson, Minimal surface (2023) 

Harmonic Space Orchestra:  M.O. Abbott (bass trombone), Ellen Arkbro (trumpet), Judith Hamann (cello), Jonathan Heilbron (contrabass), Rebecca Lane (quarter-tone flutes), Thomas Nicholson (viola), Michiko Ogawa (bass clarinet), Lucy Railton (cello)

Nina Guo & Evelyn Saylor present new works for voices, tape, and electronics, performed by Nina Guo, Evelyn Saylor and Dina Maccabee.

Program:

Nina Guo & Evelyn Saylor, Fundamental Ornamental for two voices and electronics

Nina Guo, The rides are going up again for solo voice and tape

Nina Guo, Sound Story for solo voice and tape

Evelyn Saylor, Untitled Work for voice and electronics

Evelyn Saylor, Scherzo for three voices, with Nina Guo and Dina Maccabee

Composers/vocalists Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor premiere their cycle Fundamental Ornamental. In a reversal of the roles of ornament and primary material, they isolate and manipulate specific ornaments, including trills, melismatic patterns, glissandi, and extended vocal techniques, and together develop a musical language that culturally redefines ornament as substance. Through the recontextualization of common gestures and the use of juxtapositions, they create surprising scenarios and raise questions about the production of meaning through musical idiom and context, about time and pitch perception, and about the possibilities and limitations of the vocal apparatus.

with kind support from initiative neue musik berlin e.V.

Henry Birdsey, solo bagpipes

Judith Hamann, Desire Paths for cello and electronics (4-channel version)

Henry Birdsey plays the pedal steel, lap steel, and bagpipes. His music is often drone-based and usually involves microtonal tunings. His current bands and projects include Tongue Depressor, Old Saw, Formant, and Trespass Field. 

Judith Hamann's work is focused on an examination of expressions and manifestations of shaking; a collection of new works for cello and humming; research on thinking-with geese and/as apparitions; ongoing work surrounding audio collapse as a generative imaginary surface; and de-mastering of bodies (human and non-human) in European settler-colonial heritage, instrumental practice, and pedagogy. 

Achim Kaufmann (piano), Nick Dunston (double bass) & Mariá Portugal (drums and percussion)

"One of the demands of the improvising musician is to expose themselves to new musical situations. Berlin offers a lot of opportunities for this thanks to the constant influx and continuous movement of the scene. What we bring to the process as individuals flows into the collectively created music - our personalities, stories, influences. Nick Dunston and Mariá Portugal are groundbreaking on their instruments and as composers. Both are contemporary artists, they change what already exists. But they are also connected to rich musical traditions. For me, this mixture is inspiring and promising. I am looking forward to creating music in which sound, kinetic energy and provocation all have their place." (Achim Kaufmann)

Sound as rule, notation as epilogue

An evening of performances to mark Luigi Nono's centennial, presenting compositions from his archive that scan his political, literary, and personal commitments.

• La Fabbrica Illuminata (1965) for soprano and live electronics 

• Post-prae-ludium n. 1 per Donau (1987) for tuba and live electronics 

• “Hay Que Caminar” soñando (1989) for two violins 

Diamanda La Berge Dramm (violin), Max Eilbacher (electronics), Nina Guo (soprano), Max Murray (tuba), Sarah Saviet (violin)

with kind support from Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono and Musikfonds e.V.; curation by Martina Francesca Cavalot

Matmos & Jennifer Walshe reunite after making their trio debut at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival last year.

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. 

Jennifer Walshe is a composer and performer whose recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. Walshe has worked extensively with AI. ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance (Tetbind 2020), her third solo album, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. 

Apparat+ presents a new work by Mattie Barbier and a solo set for trombone and electronics by Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø.

Program:

• Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, solo trombone & electronics

• Mattie Barbier, is this the land I wish death to find me (2024) for brass sextet and electronics

Mathilde Conley (trumpet); Samuel Stoll (horn); Max Murray (tuba); Mattie Barbier, Weston Olencki and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (trombones)

Drawing together Mattie Barbier's interests in glacial textures, psychoacoustic research, and site-specific field recording, is this the land I wish death to find me synthesizes acoustic, imaginary, and "phantom" brass instruments into a melancholic whole.

with kind support from inm Berlin e.V.

Heather Frasch and Fredrik Rasten present recent solo and ensemble works. 

Program: 

• Heather Frasch, Flickerings for objects, electronics, guitar & violin 

• Fredrik Rasten, Murmurations VII, solo for five ebowed guitars

Heather Frasch and Andrea Neumann (objects & electronics), Fredrik Rasten (guitar), Grégoire Simon (violin)

with kind support from initiative neue musik berlin e.V.

Divide by Zero #7

Carla Boregas, syntheszier & electronics

Claire Dickson, voice, synthesizer & electronics 

Carla Boregas's work spans composition, improvisation, performance, sound installation, and radio art, and aims to transport the listener to different subjective perspectives of time and space, to invoke memories, and to reflect about the nature-human relationship. She also collaborates with artists from the dance, film and theater worlds. 

Claire Dickson is a vocalist, composer, and producer whose projects embrace a range of musical aesthetics including jazz, ambient music, and art pop. At heart, she is an improviser and has developed an experimental and emergent songwriting approach based on improvising. 

with kind support from Musikfonds e.V.

Jessie Marino & Serge Vuille, Caotchouc for violin, percussion, voices & electronics

Dina Maccabee, Underachiever for voice & viola

Jessie Marino & Serge Vuille's Caotchouc is a live set of music and stories about everyday life told from the perspective of a water droplet. 

Dina Maccabee's Underachiever is a piece/persona for asking: what can it mean to "perform" by doing less? In this iteration, Maccabee creates a simple structure, with the assistance of a basic digital delay, for improvising a droning dialogue between voice (self) and viola (other), guided by harmonic information and overtones emerging in the moment of performance. This harmonically fluid, waxing and waning texture may be overlaid with songs or other materials available for "wildcrafting" from memory or the surroundings. 

wih kind support from Fondation Nicati-de Luze, CH

The Sacred Realism label presents an evening with Laura Steenberge to kick off its 13th anniversary festival.

⁍ Laura Steenberge, Piriforms (low version) (2010)

Owen Gardner, Catherine Lamb, Bryan Eubanks, Dylan Kerr (voices)

​​⁍ Laura Steenberge, The Ademar Studies (2024)

Talk and performance by Laura Steenberge on 72 Verses for St. Martial by Ademar de Chabannes, an eleventh-century monk

⁍ Laura Steenberge, Ademar Studies 2-4 (2024) for voice and viola da gamba

The 72 Verses for St. Martial, one of the earliest notated polyphonic compositions, has for many decades been considered monophonic by the academic establishment. However, in the 1990s musicologist Manuel Pedro Ferreira wrote a paper calling this into question. Steenberge builds on this work by showing how, when analyzed polyphonically, the structure of the music reveals a medieval map.

Festival Sacred Realism 2024 devotes its second day to new ensemble works by Antti Tolvi and Stefan Thut.

⁍ Stefan Thut, aground (2024)

Stefan Thut (cello), Thomas Nicholson (viola), Bryan Eubanks (saxophone, clave, sine waves), Fredrik Rasten (guitar), Rebecca Lane (quarter-tone bass flute), Catherine Lamb (viola)

Stefan Thut presents a new ensemble work exploring Just Intonation and Rational Harmony developed over the past years, often in workshops and collaborative sessions with members of the ensemble.

⁍ Antti Tolvi, Future Ballet (Berlin septet) (2024) for claves, referee whistles, subcontrabass flutes, flutes, radios, door

As a modular composition, Future Ballet varies depending on the location where it is performed. Previously, the piece was performed outdoors: in the park, in the street, and in the forest. This will be the first time the piece is performed indoors. Or, actually, the piece will also expand partly to the space outside of the venue with the participation of Bryan Eubanks, Catherine Lamb, Laura Steenberge, Boris Hauf, Fredrik Rasten, Antti Tolvi, and Rasmus Östling 

Festival Sacred Realism 2024 concludes with works by Ahti & Ahti, Östling & Herr, and Laura Steenberge.

⁍ Marja Ahti (electronics, composition) & Niko-Matti Ahti (electronics, composition)

Finnish sound artists and members of the collective HIMERA perform a new piece—developed in residence at the solitary Örö Island, a former military base off the Finnish west coast—that focuses on acoustic explorations that open up to the materiality of sound within the continuous movement of natural life and the architectural particularities of bunkers and caves.

⁍ Rasmus Östling & Adrienne Herr, Respect & Admiration

Respect and Admiration is an indexical project of unfixed formatting, constructed of implementations of various kinds, such as quasi-lectures, listening groups, audio plays, speculative maps, slideshows, tools, and multifaceted publications. Taking Red Bull and its Music Academy as its core structure and subject of study, the project aims to pick the low-hanging fruit by questioning and satirizing an overtly problematic channel of expression.

⁍ Laura Steenberge, Piriforms (2010)

performed by The Present vocal ensemble: Olivia Stahn, Hanna Herfurtner, Bernadette Beckermann, Amélie Saadia

Featured artists (Day 1): bela (electronics), Audrey Chen (voice), Che Chen (guitar), Tashi Dorji (drums), Alex Zhang Hungtai (trumpet), Susie Ibarra (drums), Yuko Kaseki (movement), Thom Nguyen (drums), Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (trombone), Lane Shi Otayonii (electronics), Hyunhye Angela Seo (piano), Victoria Shen (electronics), Jamie Stewart (guitar), Lisa Ullén (piano)

Since 2020, Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø have been organizing DEDICATED PLAY in Berlin, where they have invited diverse artists from around the world, primarily from diasporic backgrounds. While spinning a thread through the larger story of migration across continents/oceans and establishing the concept of home in shared relationships, this project seeks to bring together the commonalities of these experiences and express this communication through familial interplay, improvisation and the merging of sonic languages.

For the fourth edition of this project, BEAM SPLITTER will be expanding the concept, teaming up with XIU XIU (Hyunhye Angela Seo & Jamie Stewart) to curate a six day event across two countries, split between KM28 on Dec 7, 8, and 9 in Berlin and London's Cafe Oto on Dec 11, 12, and 13.    

Featured artists (Day 2): Audrey Chen (voice), Che Chen (guitar), Tashi Dorji (drums), Alex Zhang Hungtai (trumpet), Thom Nguyen (drums), Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (trombone), Hyunhye Angela Seo (piano), Victoria Shen (electronics), Shige (electronics), Jamie Stewart (guitar), Viola Yip (electronics)

Since 2020, Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø have been organizing DEDICATED PLAY in Berlin, where they have invited diverse artists from around the world, primarily from diasporic backgrounds. While spinning a thread through the larger story of migration across continents/oceans and establishing the concept of home in shared relationships, this project seeks to bring together the commonalities of these experiences and express this communication through familial interplay, improvisation and the merging of sonic languages.

For the fourth edition of this project, BEAM SPLITTER will be expanding the concept, teaming up with XIU XIU (Hyunhye Angela Seo & Jamie Stewart) to curate a six day event across two countries, split between KM28 on Dec 7, 8, and 9 in Berlin and London's Cafe Oto on Dec 11, 12, and 13.  

Featured artists (Day 3): bela (electronics), Audrey Chen (voice), Che Chen (guitar), Tashi Dorji (drums), Alex Zhang Hungtai (trumpet), Yuko Kaseki (movement), Thom Nguyen (drums), Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (trombone),Hyunhye Angela Seo (piano), Victoria Shen (electronics), Jamie Stewart (guitar), Lisa Ullén (piano), Viola Yip (electronics)

Since 2020, Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø have been organizing DEDICATED PLAY in Berlin, where they have invited diverse artists from around the world, primarily from diasporic backgrounds. While spinning a thread through the larger story of migration across continents/oceans and establishing the concept of home in shared relationships, this project seeks to bring together the commonalities of these experiences and express this communication through familial interplay, improvisation and the merging of sonic languages.

For the fourth edition of this project, BEAM SPLITTER will be expanding the concept, teaming up with XIU XIU (Hyunhye Angela Seo & Jamie Stewart) to curate a six day event across two countries, split between KM28 on Dec 7, 8, and 9 in Berlin and London's Cafe Oto on Dec 11, 12, and 13.  

DLW perform Grammar III & Extended Beats  

Christopher Dell (vibraphone), Christian Lillinger (drums) & Jonas Westergaard (doublebass)

In search of new music, the trio Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard has been working at the intersection of contemporary and experimental music and the avant-garde since 2010. Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard’s work is documented through numerous recordings released on Plaist, enw, HGBS Blue and bastille musique. In 2024, the release DLW: Extended Beats received the German Record Critics’ Award.

"We are a trio of composers. Our work aims at the process of exploring a new musical aesthetic. Our works move at the intersection between contemporary and experimental music and the conceptual avant-garde. Our music is characterised by its energetic intensity, physicality and architectural complexity. Breaking all genre boundaries, our music is characterised by great depth of field and plasticity. Our music derives its tonal and structural richness from the development of innovative compositional processes and conceptions. Our knowledge structure, developed over many years of collaboration, provides a stable basis for forward-looking musical research.

We position ourselves as representatives of what we call "New New Music." The heroic modernism of serialism, structuralism and musique concrète and their procedures form our reference space. The clear thrust of our trio of composers is to lift up the "unacknowledged" (Ernst Bloch) of New Music in order to make it fruitful for contemporary relevant work. Focusing on the in-between of difference and repetition, our music uses mathematically structured micro-timing, multi-perspectival looping, micro-tonality and complex superimpositions of irrational rhythmic relationships."  

www.dell-lillinger-westergaard.de 

Labor Neunzehn's Cluster #37 

Alessandro Bosetti, Plane/Talea, a multichannel piece for polyphonic vocals

Plane/Talea is an archive of anonymous voices that composer Alessandro Bosetti has been collecting for several years.
The archive preserves tens of thousands of audio files of short vocal emissions—utterances—almost all of them barely shorter than a word endowed with meaning, stored in folders that specify their characteristics but omit all biographical details about the person who originally produced them.

Each time Alessandro Bosetti performs the archive he finds himself going through it in new directions, recomposing the vocal fragments without ever altering their sound nature.
Plane/Talea performances take place through a multi-channel sound system in which the audience is immersed, with chairs distributed chaotically in the space.
Each sound performance is preceded by a few days of recordings during which, through a call for participation, anyone is invited to give fragments of their voice during individual recording sessions.

with kind support from inm Berlin e.V.

Morton Feldman's Three Voices (1982) for voice and tape, performed by Nina Guo (soprano) 

Morton Feldman's Three Voices is a nearly hour-long work for three voices, usually performed by one singer accompanied by prerecordings of the other two parts. The piece is dedicated to the singer Joan LaBarbara and incorporates text from Frank O'Hara's poem WIND. 

Zeynep Toraman, solo works for electric guitar

Marta Forsberg, solo for voice and electronics

Zeynep Toraman performs a solo set of well-tuned romantic harmonies, reimagined for electric guitar and electronics. 

Marta Forsberg performs a short set of new music based on processed choir recordings.

The book release concert for Graphème, Volume 4, featuring works by Zeena Parkins, Rabih Mroué, Catriel Nievas, Rana Baba, Magda Mayas and Carl Ludwig Hübsch 

Ute Wassermann (voice, objects), Tony Buck (percussion), Magda Mayas piano), Andrea Parkins (accordion, electronics) & Mike Majkowski (double bass)

Graphème is a publishing project featuring unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composer-performers. It aims to bridge areas between improvisation, composition, interpretation and performance. The book release of the 4th edition will be accompanied by a concert featuring the ensemble Smallest Functional Unit augmented by Andrea Parkins and Mike Majkowski.

program:

Zeena Parkins, Learning to Disguise Myself in Words Which Were Really Clouds, puzzles for a small group of improvisers  (2014/2024)
Rabih Mroué, My last visit (2024) (UA)
Rana Al Baba, Pink Noise (2023)
Catriel Nievas, continues spaces (2017)
Carl Ludwig Hübsch, 131 ways to begin (2002-2024)
Magda Mayas, Murmur (2024)