KM28
Karl-Marx-Straße 28, Berlin
Doors 20:00 / Start time 20:30 / entry by donation
April 16 Wednesday
Michelle Lou & Stefan Maier | Sarah Saviet
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
April 19 Saturday
Tryon
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.
April 23 Wednesday
Multiplex #3
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.
April 24 Thursday
Maya Bennardo & Lisa Ullén | Weston Olencki
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.
April 25 Friday
Theodor Kentros | Andrew Bernstein
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.
April 26 Saturday
Marthe Lea Band
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).
April 29 Tuesday
Philip Rizk with Lama El Khatib
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.
May 2 Friday
Lea von Wintzingerode & Stemeseder–Lillinger
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)
May 3 Saturday
Bob Ostertag | Nic Collins
Bob Ostertag, solo for gamepad controller & modular software synthesizer
Nic Collins, Semi-Conducting, solo compositions for voice, video, dead circuits, live software, and a 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.
May 8 Thursday
Adam O'Farrill's Stranger Days
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.
May 9 Friday
Mara & Forsberg | Gurinas & Dobie
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.
May 10 Saturday
Vanessa Tomlinson | Judith Hamann
Vanessa Tomlinson, solo percussion
Judith Hamann, solo cello
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.
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