The EMITTER MICRO FESTIVAL is a 3-day festival of sound art in Berlin.
It proposes a selection of international and Berlin-based artists from multiple contemporary sound practices and genres.
The Emitter Micro Festival 2013 will feature performances by Phill Niblock, Thomas Ankersmit, Kim Cascone, Jochen Arbeit+Hopek Quirin, Rinus Van Alebeek+Barbara Lazara, Seiji Morimoto, Louis Laurain, Schneider TM+Kptmichigan+Mek Obaam, Krapoola as well as a talk with Peter Cusack.
Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968’s barricade-hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. In the history books Niblock is the forgotten Minimalist. That’s as maybe: no one ever said the history books were infallible anyway.
His influence has had more impact on younger composers such as Susan Stenger, Lois V Vierk, David First, and Glenn Branca. He’s even worked with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo on “Guitar two, for four” which is actually for five guitarists. This is Minimalism in the classic sense of the word, if that makes sense. Niblock constructs big 24-track digitally-processed monolithic microtonal drones. The result is sound without melody or rhythm. Movement is slow, geologically slow.
Thomas Ankersmit (1979, Leiden, Netherlands) is a saxophonist, electronic musician and installation artist based in Berlin and Amsterdam, who combines abstract, intensely focused saxophone playing with hyper-kinetic analogue synth and computer improvisation.
He also creates installation pieces that use sound, infrasound and “modifications to the acoustic characters of spaces” that disrupt the viewer/listener’s perception of the exhibition space and their presence within it. He frequently works together with New York minimalist Phill Niblock and Sicilian electroacoustic artist Valerio Tricoli. Other collaborators, mostly for live performances, have included Tony Conrad, Maryanne Amacher, Jim O’Rourke, Kevin Drumm and Borbetomagus.
Jochen Arbeit is a German guitarist. He is a member of the band Einstürzende Neubauten (since the middle of the 1990s) and was a long-time-member of Die Haut (since 1984 until disbanding in 1997), which also included Einstürzende Neubauten percussionist Rudi Moser and Thomas Wydler, drummer of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Since 2008 he is also working with Gerd Bessler and Hopek Quirin as the trio ABQ (Arbeit Bessler Quirin), which released their first live album to Surrism-Phonoethics in January 2010.
Rinus Van Alebeek is a peculiar observer of reality and an artist who instinctively transforms lo-fi tape recordings into evocative sound poems, being able to create a “détachement” towards the used media, which is a characteristic of the most original artists.
In the first decade of this century van Alebeek made a thorough research on how to make or manipulate recordings. Thanks to a great number of concerts, sometimes an average of ten in a month, he developed an approach of which people say it is “between noise and pure poetry”.
Barbara Lázara: Voice forms, amplification and looping in relation with the acoustic characteristics of the space creating drones, natural overtones and audio feedback. Voice is a total sensual material, everything can stick in it, is sadic and masochist, it is power and pleasure.
The idiomless vocals has the power to create ephemeral senses, notions disseminated in space, transformed by ear. Like sentences said in dreams… destroying their own meanings after being said. The voice without time, the voice whose only purpose is to fill the space, the voice wothout land. An unhistorical voice.
The independent electronics artist behind Schneider TM is Dirk Dresselhaus, a former rhythm-section member for several German indie rock bands. Since the nineteen nineties he released a couple of solo albums. He gained the biggest public attention for a remix of The Smiths’ “There is a light that never goes out”, a collaboration with Kpt. Michigan, released as “The Light 3000”.
Today, Dresselhaus is besides his solo works also kept busy with projects such as Angel, his collaboration with former Pan Sonic member Ilpo Väisänen, and he frequently works with Jochen Arbeit, Damo Suzuki and Japanese dancer Tomoko Nakasato. He returned to the Schneider TM name with 2012’s Construction Sounds, a blend of field recordings and electronic improvisations inspired by the ongoing construction near his East Berlin apartment.
Seiji Morimoto was born in Tokyo 1971, studied musicology at the Kunitachi College of Music, graduating in 1996. During this period he began to play the electronic pieces by John Cage and his own sound performances. Since then he has been creating sound performances, installations and videos.
In 2003 Morimoto moved to Berlin, has performed and exhibited in many international festivals including transmediale in Berlin, Experimental Music Festival in Munich. He is interested in the uncertain acoustic appearances between usual objects, for example water and stones, and the technical medium.
Kim Cascone has been involved with electronic music for more than 20 years since his studies at Berklee College of Music and at the New School during the 1970s. In the 1980s Cascone worked with David Lynch as Assistant Music Editor on both Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart. He left the film industry in 1991 to concentrate on Silent Records, a label that he founded in 1986, transforming it into the U.S.‘s premier electronic music label.
He sold Silent Records in 1996, at the height of its success, in order to pursue a career as a sound designer. He has worked for Thomas Dolby’s company Headspace as a sound designer and composer and for Staccato Systems where he oversaw the design of new sounds for games using algorithmic synthesis.
Peter Cusack works as a field recordist with a special interest in environmental sound and acoustic ecology. Projects include community arts, researches into sound and our sense of place and documentary recordings in areas of special sonic interest (Lake Baikal, Siberia).
His project Sounds From Dangerous Places explores soundscapes at sites of major environmental damage – Chernobyl exclusion zone; Caspian oil fields; UK nuclear sites. He now describes the use of sound to investigate documentary issues as sonic journalism.
Louis Laurain was born in 1984, and started to play the trumpet as a self-taught musician. Since 2007 he has studyed improvisation at the Paris Superior Conservatory. He is specialy interested by free forms of improvisation in music (energic free-jazz, noise and minimalism).
He’s currently working with the free-jazz quartet ACTUUM. He also works with the trio DOLSE. He regularly performs improvised duet or trio performances in Paris with the bass player Joel grip and the saxophone player Yoann Durant.
The Program:
Thursday, 09 May, 19:00 CET
@ Musik-Instrumenten Museum (Curt-Sachs-Saal):
Phill Niblock
Thomas Ankersmit
Friday, 10 May, 20:00 CET
@ Naherholung Sternchen:
Jochen Arbeit + Hopek Quirin
Schneider TM + Kptmichigan + Mek Obaam
TAPEDANCES (Rinus Van Aleebeek + Barbara Lázara)
Seiji Morimoto
Gandoola oond KRAPOOLA (Dj Set)
Saturday, 11 May, 20:00 CET
@ Ausland
Kim Cascone
Peter Cusack
Louis Laurain
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Emitter Micro Festival
presented by D/B
Thursday, 09 May 2013 – Saturday, 11 May 2013
Musikinstrumenten-Museum | Tiergartenstraße 1 | 10785 Berlin/Tiergarten
Naherholung Sternchen | Berolinastraße 7 | 10178 Berlin/Mitte
Ausland | Lychener Straße 60 | 10437 Berlin/Prenzlauer Berg
http://www.emittermicro.com/
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