Kaja Draksler (piano) & Susana Santos Silva (trumpet)

Draskler and Santos Silva have performed together since 2008, first in the European Movement Jazz Orchestr and later in KASU and Cows on Trees. Their first duo release, This Love (Clean Feed 2015), was followed by Grow (Intakt 2022), which documents their performance at the 2021 Copenhagen Jazz Festival.

Clara de Asís and Rebecca Lane, Distances Bending for synthesizer & quarter-tone flutes

Etienne Nillesen, solo for two snare drums

The duo Clara de Asís and Rebecca Lane gathers around the investigation of perceptual space, collaborative processes, and the development of pieces that are, more than settled compositions, elastic systems for ceaseless states of becoming. Central to their practice is an investigation into harmonic and time proportions as well as psychoacoustic phenomena such as difference tones. Combining various flutes and electronics as a foundation for their pieces, they study the edges of their instruments within their ability for simplicity, morphing into each other through the process of tuning. Since they first met in 2018, the duo has been developing their project Distances Bending, which has taken many forms, also occasionally incorporating other musicians. 

Etienne Nillesen employs circular motions and precise control of contact points to draw out an extensive range of pitches, harmonics, and overtones from his drumheads. His work reimagines the snare drum as a complete sonic entity, transforming it from a percussive instrument into a rich source of melodic and harmonic material. As part of his approach, Etienne uses precise tuning to create a carefully balanced harmonic interplay between his two snare drums, expanding the instrument’s tonal palette and allowing for unexpected resonances to emerge. 

Sifters 

Marc Ducret (guitar), Jeremy Viner (saxophone, clarinet) & Kate Gentile (drums)

Kate Gentile and Jeremy Viner have played together for over a decade in Gentile’s bands Find Letter X and Mannequins, as well as in sideman roles with Matt Mitchell and Anna Webber. Marc Ducret contributes a broad harmonic and structural palette that contextualizes Viner’s abstract melodic phrasing.  

Making Waves #9

Lebanese actress, director and playwright Lina Majdalanie performs Do I Know You? (2017) for solo performer (in French, with English subtitles), followed by a discussion with Mazen Kerbaj.

In her solo performance, Lina Majdalanie explores the origins and political, social, and ethical implications of prosopagnosia: the inability to memorize and recognize faces. Based on her own experience, she examines prosopagnosia’s consequences within a society whose political and historical legacies are entwined with metaphors and narratives of the face. Intertweaving the personal with the political, Majdalanie investigates the grounds on which strategies of identification, categorization, and recognition are put into practice. 

Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese comics author, visual artist, and musician. He also works on selective illustration and design projects and has taught at the American University of Beirut. Kerbaj is the author pf 15 books translated into more than 10 languages, and his work has been shown in galleries, museums, and art fairs around the world.

Seeds

Tamara Walcott (voice, poetry), Rasha Ragab (voice, text), Christoph Nicolaus (stone harp) & Lucio Capece (bass clarinet, composition)

Seeds performs a new work based on Tamara Walcott's Poem for Oryza. The poem is informed by the history of how a specific, all-but-forgotten African variety of rice made its way to the Americas in the braids of enslaved girls and women. 

Program:

Tamara Walcott, Mid Atlantic post traumatic blues 

Rasha Ragab, solo performance

Seeds, Poem for Oryza

Making Waves #10

Rabih Mroué performs his non-academic lecture Before Falling, followed by a discussion with Elisa Giuliano

Starting from an incident that occurred to him during his preparation for an art exhibition in the city of Salzburg, Rabih Mroué's solo performance raises a number of questions about the relationship of art to the public sphere. What are the boundaries between fiction and reality, when the artwork goes outside the art-institution and is in a public space? This issue is raised through the story of the warning leaflets that are usually dropped from warplanes: How might an art-object might lose its definition as art, and become a threat-object? These questions interweave with other questions and stories among them the warning leaflets dropped from warplanes, and the story of the crocodile who ate the sun.

Rabih Mroué's work exists at the crossroads of theater, performance and visual arts, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, using videos, photographs, and historical documents to challenge the hegemony of archives. Rabih Mroué is co-founder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC) and was a member of the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universitat in Berlin in 2013-2015.

Elisa Giuliano is a curator, researcher, and theater maker. Her curatorial and theater work focuses on the demythologization of modernity and capitalism, by reflecting on both sexuality and gender roles in religious histories, folklore, and myth-making, particularly in modern Italy.  

Mike Majkowski presents two recent record releases: August (Gusstaff Records 2024) for solo double bass and November (Gusstaff Records 2024) for solo electronics.

Michael Thieke, solo clarinet works

Mike Majkowski's latest releases are paired records, one acoustic (August ) and the other electronic (November), both with their own distinctive atmosphere. Each album contains pieces that are closely linked in terms of approach and structure. (mikemajkowski.bandcamp.com)

Clarinetist and composer Michael Thieke explores the minutiae of sound, timbre, and noise, with a particular interest in microtonality and related sound phenomena. The qualities of slowness are another field of his research. (thieke.klingt.org/about)

After years of acquaintance, Burkhard Stangl and Christof Kurzmann founded the duo Schnee in 1999. On a snowy December night, they went to the Amann Studio in Vienna and recorded Schnee (erstwhile records 2000). This first album, inspired by favorite films (Fassbinder, Marker, Godard, Albert) and Robert Walser's poetic meditations, "set to music" this prismatic splendor, including its smallest facets and compact crystal worlds, and made big waves in the world of improvised music because it harmonized acoustic guitar and electronic sound manipulation, a rarity at the time.

Program:

•  Schnee (Burkhard Stangl and Christof Kurzmann)

•  Schnee & Guests (surprise)

•  Schnee & Guests (Kai Fagaschinski & Michael Thieke)

Burkhard Stangl (guitars, tools), Christof Kurzmann (ppooll, computer), Kai Fagaschinski (clarinet), Michael Thieke (clarinet)

Schnee continues its two-day event with a duo performance and ensembles old and new. 

Program

•  Tierfilm und Kamillentee (Annette Krebs, Christof Kurzmann, Andrea Neumann, Burkhard Stangl)

•  Schnee & Guests (Lorena Izquierdo)

•  Schnee (Burkhard Stangl and Christof Kurzmann)

Burkhard Stangl (guitars, tools), Christof Kurzmann (ppooll, computer), Annette Krebs (konstruktion#4), Andrea Neumann (inside piano) & Lorena Izquierdo (voice) 

Yannick Guédon (baritone) performs Karl Naegelen's Chaconne (2024) and Éliane Radigue's OCCAM XXII.

Marianne Schuppe & Deborah Walker, Aus dem Zeltbuch (2022/23)

In Karl Naegelen's Chaconne, the obstinacy of the pitches serves as the pillar of a composite harmony. The bass melody is layered with breaths, whistles and harmonics. A polyphony for solo voice unfolds slowly. The word "chaconne" evokes both a three-beat dance and the idea of a piece of music derived from this dance, unfolding a repetitive bass that lends itself to variations. It is to these two imaginary worlds—dance and variations—that the title echoes.

Éliane Radigue's OCCAMs are instrumental pieces that she refers to as her “sound fantasies," in which bespoke compositions are created in collaboration with her performers. 

Schuppe & Walker's joint composition Aus dem Zeltbuch (2022/23) unfolds a surface of word-sound-textures in low dynamics on the edge of acoustic intelligibility. Aus dem Zeltbuch is questioning our perception of language in a musical context by creating bilingual areas of sound. As words and sounds are superimposed they may unclose a sounding path through narration, meaning, and understandibility. 

Exhaust  Camila Nebbia (tenor saxophone), Kit Downes (piano) & Andrew Lisle (drums) 

Saxophonist Camila Nebbia, pianist Kit Downes and drummer Andrew Lisle will release their first album Exhaust on NYC label Relative Pitch in early 2025, after touring throughout Europe at festivals and venues such as Berlin Jazz Festival, Bimhuis in Amsterdam, Cafe Oto in London, and Jazz Jantar in Gdansk. 

Salim(a) Javaid (saxophone) performs solo works by Billone, Bedrossian, Netti, and Posadas.

Program:

Pierluigi Billone, Misura. Obliquo (2021; rev. 2023) for alto saxophone 

Franck Bedrossian, La Solitude du coureur de fond (2000; rev. 2023) for alto saxophone   

Giorgio Netti, Ultimo a lato (1998) for soprano saxophone 

Alberto Posadas, Serán Ceniza (2015) soprano saxophone  

Rebecca Lloyd-Jones performs Sarah Hennies' Thought Sectors for solo percussion.

One hour in length, Thought Sectors explores concepts of divided consciousness—the active and receptive brain—with the composition being based on these conditions and their manifestation through sound exploration. The virtuosic percussion solo consists not only of conventional instruments, such as the vibraphone and bass drum, but also items such as a flower sifter, stapler mixing bowl, and large pitcher of water. 

Labor Neunzehn's Cluster #38 

Aida Shiraza, solo voice, sanṭūr, and electronics, with a film screening curated by Valentina Besegher

Aida Shirazi focuses on timbre when structuring her works and draws inspiration from both Iranian and British literature. Poetry plays a central role in her work, combining the spoken word with acoustic and electronic sounds in her compositions. Shirazi sees the presence of poetry in her work as a link to her childhood in Iran, where poetry is an integral part of the shared cultural heritage and everyday language. The use of the sanṭūr is also central to this aspect of her work, as this instrument is traditionally used to play short pieces in one's free time accompanied by sung verses of classical Persian poetry. 

Queer Irreverence (as an Antidote to Authoritarianism)

A screening program featuring films by Ania Nowak, Kerstin Honeit, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, and Liad Hussein Kantorowic, followed by a discussion with several of the filmmakers. 

Ania Nowak, To the Aching Parts! (Manifesto) (2019, 15min)

Kerstin Honeit, Panda Moonwalk or Why Meng Meng Walks Backwards (2018, 8min)

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Charming for the Revolution (2009, 11min)

Liad Hussein Kantorowicz, No Democracy Here (2018, 25min) 

This program (organized by Angela Anderson) is part of the event series Thinking Toward Feminist Futures curated by Agata Lisiak and supported by Janina Schabig, Bard College Berlin, and the Experimental Humanities Collaborated Network.  

Solo sets by Rasmus Kjorstad (hardanger fiddle) and Jan Martin Gismervik (percussion), and a trio featuring Kjorstad, Gismervik & Fredrik Rasten (guitars)

Chris Corsano (drums), Chris Pitsiokos (alto sax) & Tizia Zimmermann (accordion) 

Corsano, Pitsiokos & Zimmermann first played together in New York in the summer of 2023 during Zimmermann's six-month stay there. The trio quickly found a common language that feeds on their shared interests in free jazz, improvised music, drone, and noise. 

On Strike: Screenings & Talks about Striking Berlinale is a program that makes space for films and filmmakers who have been censored or who choose to withdraw their work from the Berlinale or from other festivals that have actively silenced voices critical of the genocide against Palestinians.

•   A Fidai Film (2023, Palestine, 78 min), directed by Kamal Aljafari (Arabic, Hebrew & English with English subitles) + Davide Oberto in conversation with Kamal Aljafari (via video call)

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut. During this time, it raided the Palestinian Research Center and looted its entire archive. The archive contained historical documents of Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images. Taking this as a premise, A Fidai Film aims to create a counter-narrative to this loss, presenting a form of cinematic sabotage that seeks to reclaim and restore the looted memories of Palestinian history. It’s a poignant exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, told through a unique blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques.

•   Some Listeners Become the Warned, Others Become the Threat (2024, various, 4 min), excerpted from Preemptive Listening, directed by Aura Satz (language: English)

In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, Preemptive Listening is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 contemporary musicians form a resonant voice to ask: Does an alarm have to be alarming?

On Strike Berlinale concludes with a short-film program titled Nation Isn’t Mother, taken from Sanzgiri’s film Two Refusals. The title reflects the shared character of the films’ exploration of the meaning of nation: oppressor, savior, a place to flee, a non-place, a site of love, memory, and resistance. The screening is followed by a discussion with the directors via video chat moderated by Tobi Haslett. 

•  Death Mask, John Greyson (2023, Canada, 10 min)

This experimental opera reenacts the lesser-known history of Chinese medical student Li Shiu Tong, and his lover Magnus Hirschfeld, a much older German sexologist and gay rights pioneer during Nazi Germany.

•  Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), Suniel Sanzgiri (2024, 35 min)

An experimental film focusing on interwoven narratives around the mutual struggle against Portuguese colonialism between India and Africa, and the bonds of solidarity that developed between the two continents. Told through a mix of interviews and fictional narratives, Two Refusals utilizes a blend of CGI animation, super 16mm film, and hand-processed and destroyed archival film to uncover lost layers of world-building, kinship, and the material and immaterial network of relations that developed between historical figures in Goa, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau.

•  Atmospheric Arrivals, Ayo Tsalithaba (2021, 6 min)

A restless spirit returns home through time, space, and memory. This film is at once a living archive/poly temporal memory bank and a love letter to my other selves. Tsalithaba says, "I am inspired by the work of Akwaeke Emezi, Keguro Macharia, Sylvia Wynter, José Esteban Muñoz, and others who have pushed me to think about queer elsewheres and Black diasporic desire and (be)longing. This film has helped me articulate what I call 'atmospheric arrival', which refers to the ways in which one can come into being through imagination and by reaching across spacetimes to 'fetch' the self."   

•  Illanga Aliko (The Sun Is Missing), Advik Beni (2021, 8 min)

An experimental landscape film with an element of poetry. The film follows the son of the professional mourner who has now taken up the mantle of his father. He is confused. He does not want to mourn anymore, but it is all he knows how to do. He goes to the local flea market and purchases some chickens for a sacrificial ceremony in the name of his ancestors. Soon enough he is traversing the vast mountainous landscape of Kwa-Zulu Natal as he struggles to find a place where he belongs.

Record release concert 

Sophie Agnel (piano) & Joke Lanz (turntables) present their duo recording Ella (iDEAL Recordings and Klanggalerie 2025) 

Agnel and Lanz's first duo recording follows on the success of their trio album Animals (Klanggalerie 2023) with drummer Michael Vatcher. Eyal Hareuveni of Salt Peanuts writes, "Like in the previous collaboration, Agnel and Joke Lanz exchange brilliant, Dadaist sonic punches that simultaneously, empty this hyperactive, free improvised interplay of any high-brow importance but inject into it healthy doses of subversive, highly imaginative, and inventive ideas."

Oker  Torstein Lavik Larsen (trumpet), Fredrik Rasten (acoustic guitar), Adrian Fiskum Myhr (double bass) & Jan Martin Gismervik (drums, percussion)

Oker is an acoustic experimental quartet whose music combines fine-tuned tonalities, deconstructed grooves, acoustic noise, and other sonic events. A certain minimalist or stoic approach to sound production is an overarching and recurring element in all of Oker’s music, differentiating their sound from that found in much of improvised music and free jazz. Oker has released two records to date, Husene våre er museer (SOFA music, 2018) and Susurrus (Shhpuma 2021), with a third album slated for the fall.

Lia Kohl, solo for cello & electronics, performs music from her recent release Normal Sounds.

Lia Kohl creates and performs sonic landscapes utilizing cello, synthesizers, field recordings, and live radio to explore the mundane and profound possibilities of sound. Kohl's releases to date include two solo albums, The Ceiling Reposes (American Dreams Records 2023) and Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph 2024), and a duo with Macie Stewart Recipe for a Boiled Egg (Astril Spirits 2020).

Dylan Kerr & Michael Speers, duo for voices, electronics, and whistles

A wolf tone is an undesirable, unstable, and often uncontrollable sound that occurs when the pitch of a played note is close to a strong natural resonant frequency of the instrument's body. Dylan Kerr and Michael Speers invoke wolfing voices through Irish rebel songs.

Lawrence McGuire, I’m not an Irish ˈMan(t)lˌpēs for amplified and acoustic voice, woodblocks, and broken speakers

Together with his synthetic counterpart, Lawrence will recite his recent series of nonsense poems titled I’m not an Irish ˈMan(t)lˌpēs. Prolonged activities in asemic writing and private performances of Ultra-Lettrist poetry led him to stage a vocal standoff between his own fleshy, oral apparatus and his digitally modeled vocal tract. A competition in phonatory gymnastics where the “proto-voice” wins. 

Sam Dunscombe, Self Unsame Again Always New for clarinet and synthesized sound (commissioned in 2023 by INA GRM for the acousmonium, presented here in quadraphonic+ diffusion)

Max Eilbacher, A Glimpse of the Laughing Star for electronics and speakers

Sam Dunscombe is a Tone Ingénue working at the crossroads of experimental music, audio engineering, and spectralism. Sam has a keen interest in the ways that music allows for novel experiences of time, which has led to explorations in sound synthesis, just-intonation, improvisation, the performance of complex-notated repertoire, field recording, studio engineering, computer programming, and live electronic performance.

Max Eilbacher works with sound. That work materializes in a variety of forms: compositions, musical performances, conceptual systems, perceptual choreography, installations, and theoretical sculpture. No matter how the final work may be categorized, the art typically utilizes speakers and sound waves. A frequent concern throughout the works is an inquiry into the inextricable and complex relationship between sound and experience. At each incident of sound, a phenomenological abyss must be transversed. He is aware the listener is the agent taking such a leap. Composition (or whatever may be emanating from a speaker) is the practical enactment of such a leap. 

The second edition of Multiplex features Adam Broomberg & Ido Nahari presenting Bodies of Evidence (with discussion afterwards) and a screening of Rosalind Nashashibi's short film Electrical Gaza.

Adam Broomberg & Ido Nahari's Bodies of Evidence tracks the ways images of violence in Palestine have circulated and functioned in the past thirteen months. Examining photographs (including images from previous decades), evidence of war crimes, and the visual techniques of villainization, Broomberg and Nahari will address how these images both define the moral limits of violence and play an integral role in its enactment. Like modern warfare’s autonomous weaponry, its documentation also distances brutal cause from devastating effect. Vital to this discussion is the visibility of affliction—the war-torn bodies of damageable Arab victims vs. seemingly invulnerable Israeli soldiers—and how such optics sanctify certain forms of life while devaluing others wholesale. (Please note that the visuals that will be presented are distressing and graphic. We do not intend to inflict further harm, but to look at them with critical understanding together.)

Rosalind Nashashibi's Electrical Gaza (2015) combines her footage of Gaza—and the fixer, drivers, and translator who were her constant company—with animated scenes. She presents Gaza as under a spell: isolated, suspended in time, difficult to access, and highly charged. She shows us Gaza as she experienced it in the quiet pause before the onslaught of Israeli bombardment in the summer of 2014.

So Sner  Susanna Gartmayer (bass clarinet) & Stefan Schneider (electronics)

Miki Yui, solo electronics 

So Sner is the duo of Susanna Gartmayer and Stefan Schneider, presenting their latest release, The Well (TAK 2024). Schneider and Gartmayer began their collaboration in 2015, recording the album Reime in Kraftwerk’s former Kling Klang studio and in Düsseldorf-Kaiserswerth at Stammhaus church, whose interior wood paneling facilitated their organic sense of acoustics. 

Susanna Gartmayer has worked as a musician and composer in various realms including experimental rock, improvisation and multimedia sound performance since the early 2000s.  Stefan Schneider is a founding member of Düsseldorf's electronic outfit Kreidler and has also been a third of the internationally acclaimed trio To Rococo Rot. He has also pursued numerous collaborations with, among others, Joachim Roedelius, Arto Lindsay, Bill Wells, Dieter Moebius, Klaus Dinger, Sofia Jernberg, Koshiro Hino, John McEntire, and visual artist Katharina Grosse. 

Miki Yui presents her eighth solo album As If (Hallow Ground 2024). Since 1999, Yui has been known for her uniquely minimalist and organic approach towards music. From a tiny delicate hiss to a distant hum, electronic sounds and field recordings are woven into music with a narrative tension. She has collaborated with Klaus Dinger, Rolf Julius, Asmus Tietchens and Rie Nakajima and performs with Carl Stone in the duo Realistic Monk.

A celebration festival of the life and music of Radu Malfatti, featuring compositions for large and small ensembles and improvisations

Day 1 Program 

(all works by Radu Malfatti)

• Orchesterklang (2009) for large ensemble

• Düsseldof Vielfaches (2007) for large ensemble

• Kid Ailack 3 (2008) for shō and two electric guitars 

• Improvisation by large ensemble 

with Radu Malfatti, Rasha Ragab, Christoph Nicolaus, Germaine Sijstermans, Catherine Lamb, Deborah Walker, Michiko Ogawa, Sam Dunscombe, Koen Nutters, Heather Frasch, Rebecca Lane, Biliana Voutchkova, Quentin Tolimieri, Joe Kudirka, Ángeles Rojas, Derek Shirley, Alexander Markvart, Eric Wong, Seiji Morimoto, Bryan Eubanks, Christian Kesten, Hannes Lingens, Lucio Capece

A celebration festival of the life and music of Radu Malfatti, featuring compositions for large and small ensembles and improvisations

Day 2 Program 

(all works by Radu Malfatti)

• Naryamu Sextet (2010)  

• Keizoku (2025) for large ensemble  

• Solo improvisation for bass harmonica and playback

with Radu Malfatti, Rasha Ragab, Christoph Nicolaus, Germaine Sijstermans, Catherine Lamb, Deborah Walker, Michiko Ogawa, Sam Dunscombe, Koen Nutters, Heather Frasch, Rebecca Lane, Biliana Voutchkova, Quentin Tolimieri, Joe Kudirka, Ángeles Rojas, Derek Shirley, Alexander Markvart, Eric Wong, Seiji Morimoto, Bryan Eubanks, Christian Kesten, Hannes Lingens, Lucio Capece

Harmonic Space Orchestra presents new works by Catherine Lamb, Michiko Ogawa and Marc Sabat as well as a joint composition by Thomas Nicholson, Rebecca Lane, and Jonathan Heilbron.

Program:

•  Thomas Nicholson, Rebecca Lane & Jonathan Heilbron, A Sequence of Chords (January/February/March) (2025)

•  Marc Sabat, Partial Branches (2025)

•  Michiko Ogawa, So-jo in just intonation (2025)

•  Catherine Lamb, The Being/The World: Scenes 1, 2 and 3 (variation for HSO) (2024) 

M.O. Abbott (trombone), Michael Griener (percussion), Jonathan Heilbron (contrabass), Catherine Lamb (viola), Rebecca Lane (microtonal flutes), Dina Maccabee (voice), Thomas Nicholson (viola), Michiko Ogawa (clarinets), Fredrik Rasten (guitars) and Marc Sabat (violin) with guest conductor Max Murray 

Olivia Block, songs for piano, voice and electronics

Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, guitar and voice

Jan St. Werner, solo electronics

Olivia Block has developed a body of songs consisting of scored and improvised performances for synthesizers, amplified breath, inside-piano, electronics, organ and various materials, including metal pieces and shards of broken glass. Her current work features vintage synth sounds, voice and piano. Her most recent solo album, The Mountains Pass (Black Truffle Records) is a series of experimental songs about a mountain range in New Mexico. 

Paolo Thorsen-Nagel is a musician and artist who, in his sound, performance, and moving image works, concentrates on the materiality of sound and its relationship to physical and psychological space, as well as its visual dependency.

Jan St. Werner is head of the Fiepblatter catalog and artistic director of the Insitute of Pop Music at Folkwang University of the Arts, where his focus is on an expanded concept of sound that goes beyond music; experimental spatial concepts; and the artistic-critical examination of new technologies.

Composer-performers Evelyn Saylor and Dina Maccabee premiere new works for vocal duo, mixed vocal ensemble, and accompanied voices. The new works reflect multi-faceted engagement across contemporary and folk singing practices. Their ongoing collaborative development practice results in a shared vocabulary of interlocking shapes, “human delay,” and textural vocal play.

Program: 

•  Evelyn Saylor & Dina Maccabee, Synchronized Swimming for two voices (UA)

•  Evelyn Saylor & Dina Maccabee, Upswell for two voices, viola, and shruti box (UA)

•  Dina Maccabee, Anywhere in Any City; True Biologists / Sometimes; and Castles in the Sand, co-created canons for vocal ensemble (UA)

•  Evelyn Saylor, For After for vocal ensemble 

performed by Dina Maccabee, Evelyn Saylor, Laurel Pardue, Chris Peck, Marco Wessnigk, Johanna Ackva, Ragnar Ólafsson & Ruby Bilger

Kate Ledger performs solo piano works by Christopher Fox, Lauren Redhead, Linda Catlin Smith, and Christian Wolff.

Program:

•  Christopher Fox, Figures of Light (2023) (UA) 

•  Lauren Redhead, the spark which escapes (2019) 

•  Linda Catlin Smith, Thoughts and Desires (2007)

•  Christan Wolff, For Piano I (1952) 

•  Christopher Fox, senza misura (2018)

Ledger's recital is bookended by two Christopher Fox compositions that will appear on her soon-to-be-released album of Fox's works Unmeasured (HCR/NMC). The pieces Figures of light and senza misura reflect the composer's preoccupations with music as light and music as resonance, respectively.

Fear of the Object

Kjell Bjørgeengen (Jones VideoSynth), Aimée Theriot (cello) & Ingar Zach (vibrating membrane)

Fear of the Object is a site-specific intervention utilizing live video and sound performance to put into dialogue the architectural resonances and dissonances found within physical space, sound and light. The music is based on the frequencies and resonances of Ingar Zach´s transducer driven membranes and their relationship to Aimée Theriot´s subtle textures and feeting harmonics on the cello. Audio-generated video projected from Kjell Bjørgeengen is fed back into sound and blurs distinctions between hearing and seeing.

with kind support from the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)

Shira Legmann performs Michael Pisaro's Barricades for piano & electronics.

Michael Pisaro Barricades is a 63-minute piece consisting of thirteen studies (piano pieces, some with electronics) and two electronic interludes.

"Barricades has a distant but decisive relationship to the keyboard music of Louis and François Couperin. The title refers to Les Barricades Mystérieuses by François Couperin – and to the technique of overlapping, interlocking voices, creating a thicket or web-like texture. I have loved the music of the Couperins since college, but it was when Shira sent me some of her favorite music to play, and Les Barricades Mystérieuses was among the scores, that the idea for this piece began to crystallize. The process of writing and working on the piece with Shira was one of watching the barricades, which I pictured as a network of twisted vines, unravel." (Michael Pisaro)

Joseph Houston and Quentin Tolimieri perform solo and duo piano works by Klaus Lang, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Quentin Tolimieri and Koen Nutters.

Program: 

• Klaus Lang, Fließende Berge 

• Chiyoko Szlavnics, Constellations I-III 

  Joseph Houston (piano)

• Quentin Tolimieri, As Yet Untitled (UA)   

  Quentin Tolimieri (piano)

•  Koen Nutters, Everyone I know that you know that I know (I-VI) for 2 pianists (UA)

  Joseph Houston & Quentin Tolimeiri (piano)

Michelle Lou and Stefan Maier, multi-channel electronics duo

Sarah Saviet (violin & tape) performs a connected program of works by Jack Sheen, Johann Paul von Westhoff, Oliver Leith and Sarah Saviet.

Michelle Lou and Stefan Maier have been performing live electronics together since February 2023. Lou's constantly shifting cloud of spectral densities and angular textures are juxtaposed by Maier's throbbing drones and pointillistic interjections. Lou and Maier explore the material excess of sound, endlessly proliferating, in a state of unruly becoming.

Sarah Saviet is a violinist and composer who performs as a soloist and chamber musician and is a member of the Saviet/Houston Duo and Ensemble Mosaik. Her debut solo album SPUN (Coviello Contemporary) was recently nominated for the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik for New Music.  

Program:

Jack Sheen, Television Continuity Solos

Johann Paul von Westhoff, Imitazione delle Campane

Oliver Leith, Blurry Wake Song

Sarah Saviet, Interlace

Tryon

Erik Leuthäuser (voice), Jeremy Viner (alto sax, clarinet), Jonathan Lindhorst (tenor sax), Peter Van Huffel (baritone sax), Andrew Moreno (guitar), Joakim Rainer Peterson (piano), Kellen Mills (bass), and Quentin Cholet (drums)

Tryon is a unique large-ensemble project playing songs written by bassist and composer Kellen Mills. The ensemble blends free improvisation with complex compositions, drawing influences from Anthony Braxton and Charles Mingus and seamlessly integrating electronic and acoustic sound worlds.The group has released two albums with Double Moon Records: Läuterung (2022) with a 13-piece ensemble and Freaky Squash Baby (2023), expanding to 18 members.  

Andrew Norman Wilson, Reality Models (2016, 5:40, HD Video) 

Deborah Stratman, Hacked Circuit (2014, 15:08, HD Video) 

HOTEL ECHO LIMA PAPA, revised scene from a play written and directed by Erika Landström and performed by Tess Sahara

Of Reality Models, Andrew Norman Wilson writes, "Peppermint Park was an educational home video series produced in the 1980s by a group of investors seeking to profit off the narrative models that Sesame Street invented for educational children's entertainment. The show features a cast of puppet characters who teach children various educational lessons, ranging from letters, numbers, colors, animals, and more. Growing up, a family friend had several copies of the VHS tapes and I remember being terrified of an unexplained dance sequence by a breakaway puppet dressed to look like a scarecrow. Recently, clips from the show resurfaced online, and my relationship with the dancing scarecrow shifted from horror to obsession."

Deborah Stratman, in her over forty films and multiple artworks, has explored the various ways in which history, science, ideas, locations, and psyches intersect, often through cinematically unorthodox methods. She regards sound as the ultimate multitool and linearity to be a trap. In Hacked Circuit, multiple layers of fabrication and imposition are laid bare by this choreographed, single-shot embodiment of control. While portraying sound artists at work, typically invisible support mechanisms of filmmaking are exposed, and by extension governmental violations of individual privacy.

Erika Landström is an artist and writer working in performance, sculpture, and printed matter. Tess Sahara is a filmmaker and actor.  

Maya Bennardo & Lisa Ullén, duo for violin and piano

Weston Olencki, all my father's clocks for extended autoharp, electronics, vibration motors, bells and chimes

Maya Bennardo'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. 

Lisa Ullén is a pianist who has devoted herself to free jazz, avantgarde and contemporary classical, and experimental music. A versatile player with a singular musical vision, Ullén has repeatedly proven her ability to imprint her absolute sense for tonal texture on whatever musical context she appears in. Recent releases include her solo piano album Heirloom (Fönstret 2024) and, with her trio SPACE, Embrace the Space (Relative Pitch 2024).

Weston Olencki's work is focused on sonic materialism and the embedded, multilayered histories of instrumental music. They will present new material from an upcoming LP entitled all my father's clocks for extended autoharp, electronics, vibration motors, bells, and an array of chime mechanisms salvaged from grandfather clocks. The work weaves together autobiographical ties to family, nostalgia, time, and their ambivalent relationships with the American South.

Theo Kentros, solo electronics

Andrew Bernstein, solo saxophone & electronics

Theodor Kentros is a composer and musician who has been an active member of Fylkingen for over a decade and co-runner of the XKatedral label since 2016 and Kalkatraz Cassettes since 2017. His live set currently consists of live renditions of his debut LP Trystero (Moloton 2024), incorporating tape loops, organ drones, and physical modeling synthethis. 

Andrew Bernstein is composer, performer and sound artist known for his work as a soloist and as a member of Horse Lords. His latest release is Shadows and Windy Places (OMA Editions 2025), a collection of pieces that explore, individually and taken as a whole, the idea of the in-between: the space between creative impulses, the shades of harmonic perception, the fluid transition between melodic ideas, between senses of self. 

Marthe Lea Band

Marthe Lea (tenor saxophone, flutes, piano, vocals, udungu, percussion), Andreas Røysum (clarinet, bass clarinet, double bass clarinet, flute, vocals, percussion), Hans P. Kjorstad (fiddle, vocals, percussion), Egil Kalman (double bass, modular synthesizer, vocals), Hans Hulbækmo (drums, percussion, vocals)

The Marthe Lea Band returns to Germany after their highly touted performance at JazzFest Berlin in November 2023. They have since released Herlighetens Vei (Motvind Records, 2023), the follow up to their acclaimed debut Asura (Motvind Records, 2021).

Making Waves #10

A screening of Phiip Rizk's Terror Tales (2024) followed by a discussion with Rizk and Lama El Khatib

Philip Rizk's Terror Tales reflects on the role of the image in creating narratives of terror that legitimize systematic regimes of racism—be it the American Dream or the ongoing Zionist annihilation of life in Palestine. Rizk is a filmmaker and writer from Cairo living in Berlin. As methods for “making the habitual strange,” he uses performance in his film Out on the Street (2015, co-directed with Jasmina Metwaly) and experiments with montage in his ongoing film Land Listening (2025-current) and his found-footage films Mapping Lessons (2020), Terrible Sounds (2022), and Terror Tales (2024). In a world that is breaking down, a question that runs throughout Rizk’s projects is “How do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?” He is co-editor of the upcoming book Neocolonization and Its Dismantling, which puts Frantz Fanon’s final manifesto The Wretched of the Earth in conversation with the movements behind the popular chant from Arabic-speaking regions, “The people want the fall of the system.” 

Lama El Khatib is a writer and cultural worker. Her research and practice focus on questions and histories of labor and property, relations of debt and inheritance, and the intellectual and political legacies of abolition.

die anhörung (part I)

die anhörung (part I), a one-night event conceived of by the artist Lea von Wintzingerode, brings together a new body of her visual works with a live set by the duo Stemeseder–Lillinger, forming an immersive, acoustically responsive installation.

This encounter is neither a traditional exhibition nor a concert, but a time-based activation of space through visual and sonic means. The paintings—equipped with transducers and acoustic frames—act as resonant bodies, participating in the soundscape as much as receiving it. Together, the artists transform the room into a field of heightened perception, where sound is not only heard, but felt and seen.

Elias Stemeseder (piano, cembalo, synthesizers), Christian Lillinger (drums, electronics) & Lea von Wintzingerode (paintings, acoustic frames, transducers)

Bob Ostertag, solo for gamepad controller & modular software synthesizer

Nic Collins, Semi-Conducting, solo compositions for voice, video, dead circuits, live software, and woodpecker

Bob Ostertag began his musical career in 1978, touring Europe with Anthony Braxton, playing a keyboard-less modular analog synthesizer. He was not the first person to take a modular synthesizer on stage, but he was the first to center his musical practice in a scene of free improvisors using a modular synth as his main ax. In 1979 he settled in New York City and became a key part of the late 1970s Downtown scene along with John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourne. He left music for most of the 1980s and immersed himself in the Central American revolutionary movements of the time. His goodbye to the Salvadoran revolution, a composition titled Sooner or Later, is considered a classic of electronic music.

Nic Collins celebrates the release of his new book, Semi-Conducting: Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket (Bloomsbury 2025), with a program of solo compositions. An early adopter of microcomputers for live performance, Collins also makes use of homemade electronic circuitry and conventional acoustic instruments. His book, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (Routledge 2006), has influenced emerging electronic music worldwide.

Adam O'Farrill's Stranger Days

Adam O'Farrill (trumpet), Xavier Del Castillo (tenor sax), Walter Stinson (bass) & Zack O'Farrill (drums)

Composer and trumpet player Adam O'Farrill's has released the critically acclaimed albums Stranger Days, El Maquech, and Visions of Your Other. His latest album, Hueso, is the next chapter in the story of his longtime quartet. Produced by Spencer Murphy, the music on Hueso is a departure from the urban landscape, an attempt to channel the pastoral serenity of rural western Maine, where the band participated in a farm residency in the weeks leading up to their recording session. The album primarily features compositions by Adam, among them Gesturing Towards The West, a piece whose structure is inspired by the cadences of jisei, a type of death poem from Japan. It also contains two interpretations of Thom Yorke’s Truth Ray: one in the form of a solo trumpet performance and the other featuring the whole quartet.

Mara (viola & electronics) & Marta Forsberg (electronics) 

Alanas Gurinas & Sholto Dobie, A Hiss of Light (Infant Tree 2025)

Composer and sound artist Mara creates long-form pieces that weave together melodies, spoken word, and textures, exploring the rhythms and melodies contained in natural environments. Marta Forsberg is a sound artist and musician whose work delves into themes of language and human memory, with a strong focus on archival research. Lately, she has been experimenting with the interplay between human and synthetic voices, creating soundscapes that are both intimate and ethereal.  

Sound artists Alanas Gurinas and Sholto Dobie have collaborated to produce their first duo release, A Hiss of Light. Both artists work with acoustic sound sculptures and self-made instruments made with everyday materials. In the case of Gurinas, vibrating and tautx paper objects emit pulsing sine tones, organic chirps and shimmering noises that drift like weather fronts, whilst in Dobie’s work, air is the main material, compressed and channeled through a set of valves, tubes, and timers into pipes of various origins. 

Vanessa Tomlinson (percussion) performs selections from her new release The Edge is a Place (Room40, 2025).

Judith Hamann (cello, voice, electronics) performs selections from their new release Aunes (Shelter Press, 2025), with guests Dina Maccabee and Catherine Lamb (voices).

Vanessa Tomlinson is a percussionist, composer and improviser whose music orbits broadly around extended approaches, site-specific investigations, minimalist reductions, a sense of embodied play, and an exploration of objects. 

Judith Hamann's work encompasses performance, improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, field recording, electronics, site-specific generative work, and microtonal systems. Currently their work is focused on an examination of expressions and manifestations of "shaking" in solo performance practice, a collection of new works for cello and humming, and ongoing research surrounding the collapse and the de-mastering of instrumental practice. 

Iriai Verlag label night

Sebastian von der Heide & Elizabeth Davis, duo for percussion, violin and electronics 

CDNoé, solo electronics

Iriai Verlag presents Sebastian von der Heide of Inner Cop Avoidance in a new duo with Elizabeth Davis, as well as a solo set by CDNoé presenting their new release Ornamental Hermits (Iriai 2025).

Sawt Out presents its new album Sawt Out: Fake Live in America, in the first of two episodes, the first unplugged and the second plugged.

Burkhard Beins (percussion), Mazen Kerbaj (trumpet) & Michael Vorfeld (percussion)

Over its first six years, the trio Sawt Out focused entirely on their unusual acoustic instrumentation, consisting of trumpet and two sets of percussion. They then invented an electro-acoustic version of the group as their second musical leg. Whether acoustic or electronic, Sawt Out creates bewildering sound worlds rich in detail and tight musical interaction.

Okkyung Lee (cello), Emilio Gordoa (percusion) & Isabella Forciniti (modular synthesizer) 

The new trio of Lee, Gordoa & Forciniti pushes the boundaries of sound, blending acoustic and electronic elements in an immersive, improvisational performance.

In March 2025, Magda Mayas and Boris Hauf released GAZA, featuring contributions from 48 artists, all centering around piano, keyboard and organ-based compositions.  Available as a digital-only release on Shameless Records, all proceeds are being donated to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Gaza Children's Fund, which provides critical medical care to children in Gaza and Lebanon.

Tonight's concert features live performances by 10 of the contributing artists: Ernst Surberg, Harri Sjöström, Achim Kaufmann, Andrea Neumann, Anais Tuerlinckx, Volker Meitz, Simon James Phillips, Magda Mayas, Xenia Hauf, and Boris Hauf. All proceeds from the concert directly support the Ghassan Abu Sittah Gaza Children's Fund—and as a thank you, you'll receive a download code for the album.

Quentin Tolimieri (piano) & Eric Wong (guitar, electronics), record relase concert for Tolimieri/Wong, Erasures (Ftarri 2025)

The music of Tolimieri/Wong is a music of erasure. Specifically, they are attempting to remove various syntactical structures from their work, for example melody, harmony, gesture, and formal development. The impetus for this removal is a desire to evade the historical models that these syntactical structures force upon the listener and that serve, in a sense, to obscure the "sound-in-and-of-itself" (if such a thing exists) of the sonic object. The results of this removal is a music that is extremely minimal and reduced, closer to a kind of sound sculpture than to traditional concert music.​

Gabriela Areal (cello) & Adam Asnan (cartridge looper machines, analog machines)

Gabriela Areal designs scores and develop methods that explore instrumental and human group behaviors through basic principles of acoustic phenomena, process-based structures, and interweaving notions of relief. 

Adam Asnan is an electroacoustic musician and location sound recordist whose work promotes the aesthetic potential of sound-capture, amplification, auditory "imaging," and the virtues of both acoustic and synthetic spatialisation. Most recently, he's been concerned with ideas of "phonogeny" (as a parallel to photogeny) in sound recording and tonal works for instrumentalizing reverb.

Making Waves #11

Melanie Schweizer in discussion with Hanno Hauenstein, with screenings of Éric Baudelaire, [sic] (2008) and Rabih Mroué, Cut Erase Replace (2011/25)

Melanie Johanna Schweizer is a lawyer and political scientist specializing in business and human rights. She served as a senior legal advisor at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs until February 2025, when she was dismissed due to her public statements critical of Israel's actions in Gaza. Schweizer was a Bundestag candidate for the MERA25 party in the 2025 federal elections, representing Berlin-Mitte, and placed fourth on the Berlin state list. Her legal training included placements at the Cottbus District Court, Berlin Police Department, Cottbus Public Prosecutor's Office, a Berlin law firm, and a human rights organization in Jordan. Prior to her government role, she practiced as an attorney. 

Hanno Hauenstein is an independent journalist, author, and speaker known for his incisive reporting on contemporary politics, culture, and media ethics. His work spans both German and international outlets, with bylines in publications such as The Guardian, The Intercept, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung. He is also the founder and editor of aviv Magazine, a Hebrew-German arts journal that explores cultural intersections between Germany and Israel. Hauenstein's recent articles have addressed issues such as Germany's deportation of pro-Palestine activists and the country's political dynamics concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict.