ALARME at Radialsystem V

Billed as an International Jazz and Soundart Meeting, the A’larme festival takes place again this year (its 3rd instalment) with an impressive line up featuring the likes for Colin Stetson, Zu, Bill Laswell, Fennesz & Lillevan and many more. With the opening night at Berghain and the subsequent 3 nights at Radialsystem V this is sure to be an exhilarating event.

Colin Stetson was born and raised in Ann Arbor, and spent a decade in San Francisco and Brooklyn honing his formidable talents as a horn player, working extensively live and in studio with a wide range of acts including Tom Waits, TV on the Radio, Arcade Fire, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson.

Meanwhile he has developed an utterly unique voice as a soloist, principally on saxophones and clarinets, his intense technical prowess matched by his exhilarating and emotionally gripping skills as a songwriter. Colin’s astounding physical engagement with his instruments (chiefly bass and alto saxophones) produces emotionally rich and polyphonic compositions that transcend expectations of what solo horn playing can sound like.

Bill Laswell (born February 12, 1955, Salem, Illinois, and raised in Albion, Michigan) is an American bassist, producer and record label owner.Laswell ranks among the most prolific of modern musicians, being involved in hundreds of recordings with many collaborators from all over the world. Laswell’s music draws upon many different genres, most notably funk, various world music, jazz, dub and ambient styles. He has also played or produced music from the noisier, more aggressive end of the rock spectrum, such as hardcore punk and metal.

For over fifteen years, Zu’s modus operandi of straddling and abusing musical genres has resulted in over fifteen unique album releases across labels such as Ipecac, Atavistic and Headz (Japan). Their experimental amalgam of metal, math, no-wave, noise and electronics, led acclaimed composer John Zorn to describe their sound as “a powerful and expressive music that totally blows away what most bands do these days”.

Vienna based Christian Fennesz has been paving the way for the interplay between electronic music and organic instruments since the 1990s. Working together with labels such as Mego, Touch or ECM, Fennesz has been characterizing the dissociation of the electric guitar via electronic editing, the disbandment of natural sounds to form a modulated sound space, in which complex threads unite to abstract compositions.