Two improvisers who relentlessly seek beyond the instrument limitations. Extended techniques, preparations, usage of electronics, that’s common base for Birgit and Petr, a duo that came into being after a concert at The NOW now festival in Sydney, whose organizers had the superb idea to make them play together. They also played together in Prague, at blurred edges festival in Hamburg and at New Adits Festival in Klagenfurt, Austria and released their first CD Schallschatten on the label Inexhaustible Editions in 2021.
http://birgit-ulher.de/
https://vrrrba.cz/

 

Sabine Lippold works, among other things, at the University of Music and Performing Arts Frankfurt/Main in the field of acting/directing. She is interested in the connection between physical expression and human thought. Andreas Nordheim plays cornet, soprano trombone, and descant trumpet and is interested in music as an model of social life. The two of them have been working together for many years.
In their research, they attempt to connect movement thinking and musical thinking. . They see playing limitations not as a loss of freedom, but rather as an opportunity to focus on individual elements more closely, exploring the effects of subtle changes in the playing. This also results in surprising resonances for the audience through the simultaneous perception of different gestures and sounds which seems to tell stories. Instead of pursuing the mantra of “bigger, faster, farther,” the duo aspires to cultivate the art of oscillation.
https://www.andreas-nordheim.de/

Interview:

How would you describe the sound/gesture of your artistic world?
Sabine: Sensations are subtle and act within the body. They trigger trembling, vibrating, twitching. Gestures form in the echo of this.
Andreas: I perceive my play as gestural movement, as acoustic lines in space.

What have you been busy with lately, and what are your projects for the near future?
Sabine and Andreas: At the moment, we are intrigued by experimenting with the translation of literary ideas into musical/gestural ones, which affects the overall ambience.

What influences your artistic work?
Sabine: I have been dealing with the ideas of Rudolf von Laban, Moshé Feldenkrais, Mabel Todd, among others, for many years. This has significantly influenced my artistic thinking.
Andreas: I enjoy reading. Many books, as expressions of human thought, inspire me.

Are there emotions, ideas, or concepts that predominate in your work? If so, which ones?
Sabine: I am interested in the spectrum of what can be expressed physically. This pre-verbal articulation influences consciousness. The sensations coming to me form the starting point of my movement research.
Andreas: I like to play with formal patterns initially and then be surprised when ideas or analogies sneak in.

Which artist are you hyping or have you (re)discovered lately?
Sabine: I find many artists from various fields interesting. As two examples, I would like to mention Jordi Savall and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.
Andreas: I am currently reading Wolfgang Ulrich’s “Tiefer hängen” (Hang Deeper). I like the idea that we should hang art lower and definitely not hype it.

Analog or digital?
Sabine: Analog – The body is immediate. I prefer encounters with others in space.
Andreas: Analog – I have little experience with digital music production.

What is the first sound you hear in the morning?
Sabine and Andreas: Unfortunately, often cars.

Samantha, a Berlin-based Brazilian artist, invites us to enter her personal universe. Her artistic practice is rooted on her synesthetic perceptions, allowing her to visualize sounds as forms and spaces. She is autist, what gives her a special perception about the world, which she delves into both for self-discovery and healing.

Through her immersive work, Samantha offers a window into her psyche, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the now. Each piece serves as an invitation to contemplate existence, reality and the interaction of sensory perceptions. Her political ambitions are to promote a society that accepts different communities, as they are.

https://www.samanthatiussi.com/

Jolon Dixon is a New Zealand-born live artist, wordsmith and composer based in Leipzig. He studied theatre in Dunedin and music composition at the Edinburgh College of Art and has performed and improvised in many parts of Europe. He makes live art and frozen art too, sometimes in front of audiences. He also makes scores and other objects for himself and others which use simple tasks and interventions to encourage people to interact with the non-determined happenstance of the space. His work aims to make a drama between sounds, objects, and bodies wrestling with all the stimulus that emerges from a constructed social and embodied environment. His sound and music is by turns piquant and playful and in his text and video he explores the intersection of poetry, anthropology and technology.
https://linktr.ee/vinyldinosaur

Interview:

How would you describe the sound of your artistic world?
Spicy – I’ve used this word for a while now, but it now has a new layer of meaning coming out of Socialmediaville. Someone can make a spicy comment or tell a spicy joke. Here spicy stands for something provocative, mischievous or daring. For instance I might call myself neurospicy rather than neurodivergent to bring the playful and exciting aspects of my mind’s difference to mind. With an earlier sense of the word, I seek to describe music via bodily experiences rather than through referring to genre or technique. So I often resort to culinary metaphors despite being terrible in the kitchen. Like music, cooking takes time and tasting takes time too. Different notes of aroma and flavour arrive at different times as the portion moves from plate to mouth to stomach (Is this why I don’t like recapitulation?). My music is sometimes crunchy and sometimes fluffy but when I have reasonable doubt I add spice.

What have you been working on recently and what are your projects for the near future?
Working on performing live and letting my body be free of being a musician, a freedom from all the roles and rules of being a sound-making body for a public – I’m still working out the how. Making performances for video and other eyes. I hope to find a route back to using scores as part of my music practice and look to form a collective to make poetic sound theatre.

What influences your artistic work?
Late capitalism. Wrestling with the tools I have been granted. The places I live and perform within in the here and now. All the true weird girls from history such as Ustvolskaya or Janáček. Children.

Are there emotions emotions, ideas, notions that are prevalent in your work? If so, which ones?
Intimacy and spicy softness. Cheekiness, silliness and camp. Connection and Verfremdungseffekt. Magic Banality. Underneath this all I want to make spaces for people to be moved and find movement. We live in an occularcentric world. I hope that live art can help us to move away from this narrowness by enlivening other modes of perception. Movement sits beside thinking and all the other senses and music can tickle movement inside and out.

Which artist did you (re)discover recently?
Björk – it’s a long journey for me from discovering classical music in my teens and finding every other kind of music dull to returning to other forms of music, now able to find other somethings to which to listen that move me. Like groove, the sonic gestalt, and true weird girl vocals.

Analogue or digital?
Egg Timers or sandglasses? I look for anything that reveals the richness of the world. Slicing, dicing, sifting, sieving. Broasting.

What’s the first sound you hear in the morning?
Footsteps back and forth across my ceiling. I don’t think my neighbour is well-organised to leave their flat in the morning quickly. I’m much more into dreamful sleep than deep listening at this time of day.

Postscript
After writing my responses in a cafe, I walked along the left side of the street and came across a box of giveaways. I found an 7-year-old calendar of Irish countryside sights and a paperback copy of a Victorian novel. On the back cover I found a quote from the book, which read:
“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”
Don’t judge a book by its book-cover quote.

Gerard Lebik is a sound artist, improviser, composer, and saxophonist. He works with experimental, improvised, and intermedial music, exploring heterogeneous sources and research methods of sound. Burkhard Beins, born in 1964 in Lower Saxony, has been living in Berlin since 1995. As a composer and performer working in the fields of experimental music and sound art, he is known for his definitive use of percussion in combination with selected sound objects.
Gerard Lebik and Burkhard Beins create musical forms of minimalist idiom, which consist of isolated sound events as well as gradually revealing harmonies and resonances. Metallic sounds from a large heavy cymbal are amplified and blend with electronically generated sine waves of varying amplitude, unfolding in a continuous glissando. One can see here a great sensitivity in determining the means of expression and formal concepts. The artists do not shape the pieces into dynamic structures with a linear course but strive to achieve a specific effect of micro-flickering of sound – an illusion of suspension of time. (Paweł Szroniak)

Home

http://www.burkhardbeins.de

 

Nadelør consists of multi-instrumentalist, sound artist, and composer Nime and sound, performance, and media artist burgund t brandt. In their live performances, the duo explores acoustic spaces, ideas of electroacoustic and post-serial music in the tradition of musique informelle.
burgund t brandt, also known as Amelie Neumann, is a Leipzig-based sound, performance, and media artist. She explores and transforms the relationship of the in-between under aspects of performative listening in theory and practice. Her working method can be described as a playful dissection of the everyday, in particular the inherent instabilities of human(ity), natural(ity), communication and medium.
Nime, also known as Jonas Petry, is a multi-instrumentalist, sound artist, and composer based in Leipzig. His musical interest focuses on the exploration, transformation and conscious modification of sonorities as well as rhythmic interweavings. His repertoire includes prepared drums, piano, daf, tonbak as well as natural and synthesised found objects.
https://xn--nadelr-fya.de/