biegungen im ausland: Bend/break solo festival at ausland / Thursday, 14-15.09.2017

The long going series biegungen im ausland presents their “bend/break solo festival”, dedicated to the solo art of eight musicians from the field of contemporary composition and improvisation, free jazz and sound art. On both evenings, September 14 and 15, four musicians are playing.

The first night presents composer Makiko Nishikaze performing her new piece “clavics-more 1” for amplified solo clavichord and tape, the vocalist Agnes Hvizdalek with her abstract vocal music, current DAAD stipend Charo Calvo with two acousmatic pieces and Kaja Draksler with improvisations and compositions on piano.

The second night presents improvising pianist Sylvia Bruckner, vocalist Audrey Chen with her “Stag Song”, jazz musician Silke Eberhard on saxophone and Charlotte Hug, performing her Sonic-Icons with viola and voice.

Makiko Nishikaze’s “clavics-more 1” is played live on the old keyboard instrument clavichord, electroacoustically combined with sounds also taken from the clavichord. She has composed and recorded several studies and developed the tape parts out of this material. They combine with the live part in different ways: harmonically supporting or opposed and rich in contrast, as a whole in the form of a new concertante.

The abstract vocal music of Agnes Hvizdalek from Austria, currently living in Norway, consciously connects to the tradition of concrete and sound poetry, at the same time adapting and transforming it. From her childhood on, she has been dedicated to new music and to the possibilities of the human voice, which can be experienced in her virtuosic performances in a fascinating way.

The composer and sound designer Charo Calvo is guest of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD. She is performing two of her acousmatic works, whose effect is often based on the elementary use of language and on narrative and emotional impact. “Phonobiographie” is a radio piece consisting of French and Spanish sentences, with which she has won the Palma Ars Acustica EBU 2014 price. In the piece she travels back to the first 26 years of her life that she had spent during the dictatorship of Franco, then ending with her move to Belgium. “That Wound” is a gestural composition, that, once brought to life, lasts on to the moment, when the first impulse is about to ebb away.

Kaja Draksler is an exceptional pianist from Slovenia living in Amsterdam, who playfully and with a great sense of art moves between jazz, free improvisation, contemporary music and music from the Balkan countries. She has been studying jazz piano as well as classical composition, which both influenced her highly original and complex solo playing.

The second evening is opening with Austrian pianist Sylvia Bruckner, who is rooted in different styles. Her solo work often focuses on the use and preparation of the inside of the piano. Impulsiveness, ecstatic intensity, extreme contrasts and being in the moment are important categories for her performance, which can also be experienced in the quiet and reflective moments of her music.

Audrey Chen’s “Stag Song” is a solo for amplified voice. Utilizing her rich arsenal of self taught vocal techniques, she moves through inhuman sound materials akin to analog electronics and granular synthesis, to animal and insect, and continuously touching back and forth between more visceral human expressions. The result is a kind of ephemeral ritual which is in the end, essentially and deeply human.

Silke Eberhard is a saxophonist, clarinetist and composer who is mostly heard as a substantial voice in many Berlin (free) jazz groups. But also as solo artist she has developed a profound articulation on her instrument, which can be characterized by variety of sounds and richness of ideas.

The Swiss violist, vocalist and painter Charlotte Hug closes the festival with her interdisciplinary art, in which she translates her imaginations of sound into drawings and then back into her ecstatic and highly virtuosic music. She is constantly pushing the boundaries of her instrument using her “soft bow technique” among other possibilities, with which she practically reinvented the viola. Her specialty is also a blend of viola and vocals using high falsetto, vibrating glottal sounds, multiphonics and language like articulation, which has resulted in an unmistakable and unique tonal language.

Kindly supported by Kulturverwaltung des Landes Berlin
Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik der initiative neue musik berlin e. V.