Since first playing in East Berlin in 1987 (at Das Haus der jungen Talente), John Butcher has been a regular visitor to the city – both with his own groups and for valuable collaborations with many Berlin based musicians. This year, coinciding with his 65th birthday, Butcher has been invited for a 2 night residency at ausland, playing in established and new groupings.
John Butcher is well known as a saxophonist who attempts to engage with the uniqueness of time and place. His music ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and unusual acoustics. His well received “Resonant Spaces” CD is a collection of site-specific performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands. Since the early 80s he has collaborated with hundreds of musicians – including Derek Bailey, John Stevens’ SME, Polwechsel, Eddie Prévost, Rhodri Davies, Akio Suzuki, Matt Shipp, Phil Minton, Christian Marclay, Gino Robair, Fred Frith, Mark Sanders, Okkyung Lee, The Contest of Pleasures and Gerry Hemingway.
With solid training as a classical musician, Sophie Angel took a close interest in modern jazz before committing in the early Nineties to the shifting, deliciously uncertain ground of free improvisation, thanks to her fascination for the powers of expression displayed by a few great keyboard-heretics such as Keith Tippett, Fred Van Hove or Christine Wodrascka. Taking a look through the prism of improvised music, Sophie Agnel began reworking the prepared piano techniques imagined by John Cage in the field of contemporary music, and from that point she would busy herself “introducing the prosaicism of the contemporary world into the belly of western musical refinement itself”, and transform her instrument into a sort of “extensive prep-piano” or “extended piano”, thereby laying the foundations of a radically materialist personal universe that is by turns lyrical, abstract and sensualist.
Since about 1990 Thomas Lehn’s central artistical work is live-electronic music, created on the basis of analogue sound synthesis. After a period of working with the Robert Moog’s minimoog synthesizer, since 1994 his main electronic equipment is the Synthi A modular analogue synthesizer combined with the DK-2 keyboard, both developed and produced by the British company EMS in the late 1960ies. Thomas Lehn’s electronic music is instrumentally live-performed. Musical material, process and structure are created and performed in real time. Gino Robair has created music for dance, theater, radio, television, silent film, and gamelan orchestra, and his works have been performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. He was composer in residence with the California Shakespeare Festival for five seasons and served as music director for the CBS animated series The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. His commercial work includes themes for the MTV and Comedy Central cable networks.
biegungen im ausland: NI-VU-NI-CONNU presents John Butcher – Day 1: With Sophie Agnel, Thomas Lehn & Gino Robair
Friday, 29th November 2019 | Doors 20:30 CET | Starts 21:00 CET
ausland | Lychener Str. 60 | 10437 Berlin
