CON-MYTHOLOGY #183 at Spektrum / Friday, 12.08.2016

CON-MYTHOLOGY #183: The Life and Work of Conrad Schnitzler

Doors: 19:30 / Start time: 20:00

Entrance 7-10 euro (based on your offer)

An evening of audio and video celebrating Schnitzler’s life and work, performed by Gen Ken Montgomery, Wolfgang Seidel, Chris Penalosa, and Doron Sadja.

Conrad Schnitzler, composer and conceptual artist, is one of the most important representatives of Germany’s electronic music avant-garde. He studied sculpture with Joseph Beuys, before leaving Düsseldorf Kunstakademie to focus on experiments with synthesizer and tape. In 1967, he co-founded the radical Zodiak Free Arts Lab in West Berlin, which became the center for kosmische music. A founder of Kluster and an early member of Tangerine Dream, Schnitzler’s experimental, industrial soundscapes defined the early releases of these seminal groups. Always moving forward, he embarked on a solo career that spanned five decades of invention, with a vision remarkably ahead of its time.

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Gen Ken Montgomery is a New York-based artist whose involvement in the cassette-culture and mail-art movements of the late seventies led to the creation of the label Generations Unlimited in 1987 and Generator Sound Art Gallery in 1989. After working with Schnitzler in Berlin in the eighties, Montgomery became a performer and CONductor of Schnitzler’s multi-speaker Cassette CONcerts. Montgomery performed Schnitzler’s Cassette CONcerts weekly at Generator in total darkness playing cassette sent through the post from Berlin. Montgomery also composes octophonic compositions using amplified appliances, field recordings, voice, and electronic instruments. Montgomery continues to create immersive listening experiences in many forms.

Chris Penalosa is a multidisciplinary artist based in Queens, New York. He performs improvised modular electronics. He uses modern signal processing as an improvisational tool to sculpt sounds in real time. Penalosa will use Conrad Schnitzler’s breadth of media, smearing boundaries of Schnitzler’s sculpture, recorded media, moving image, and improvised electronics.

Wolfgang Seidel, a native of Berlin, first met Conrad Schnitzler at the infamous Zodiak Free Arts Lab in 1968, and in 1969 joined Schnitzler’s improvisation ensemble Kluster – Eruption, which lasted until Schnitzler’s death in 2011. Under the name Sequenza, he played on albums with Schnitzler. Seidel has remained active in the underground Berlin scene, most recently as a member of the improvisational duo “Five Eyes”. In Europe, Seidel conducts Conrad Schnitzler’s multiple source Cassette Concerts, and has organized film screenings and nights celebrating Schnitzler’s life and work.
Doron Sadja is an American artist, composer, and curator whose work explores modes of perception and the experience of sound, light, and space. Often working with multichannel spatialized sound, smoke machines, and high intensity lights, Sadja combines pristine electronics with lush romantic synthesizers, dense noise, and immersive light projections to create hyper-emotive sonic architecture. Sadja founded Shinkoyo Records and the West Nile performance space in Brooklyn (RIP), and currently runs the Sound Portraits lecture/listening series in Berlin.