Kontraklang w/ Polwechsel + Klaus Lang at Ev. Brüdergemeinde / Friday, 22.05.2015

For about twenty years Polwechsel have been operating at the interface between improvised music and contemporary composition. Recognised as one of the seminal groups in this area, they started out when a paradigm shift in music was taking place.

Driven by a small, close-knit circle of musicians, notably in Vienna, Berlin and Tokyo, this shift introduced profound changes in the development of contemporary electro-acoustic and experimental music, as the relations between avant-garde, high art, pop and various subcultures of the nineties were re-evaluated.

httpv://https://youtu.be/akHqUFKq_ig

The musicians involved in this transition drew on modes of playing employed by improvisational collectives of the sixties but also referred to influences from the highly concentrated sound and noise works of new music composers while keeping a critical distance to the energy and expressiveness of free improvisation, as well as embracing genres such as rock music, noise, and electronic club culture.

But more than anything else they called into question the polemically defended former opinion of a dichotomy between composition and improvisation. This has resulted in musical concepts and performance practices that traditional terms alone can no longer adequately describe.

httpv://https://youtu.be/kWD8bwTshN8

Klaus Lang (*1971 Graz / Austria) lives in Steirisch Lassnitz (Austria). He studied composition and theory of music (with H.M. Preßl, B. Furrer and Y. Pagh-Paan) and organ. Klaus Lang loves tea and dislikes lawnmowers and Richard Wagner. Klaus Lang’s music is not a means to convey extramusical contents, such as emotions, philosophical or religious ideas, political propaganda, advertisement etc… His music is no language used to communicate non-musical content.

Music is seen as a free and selfstanding acoustical object. In his work he is not using sound, sound is explored and given the opportunity to unfold its inherent rich beauties. Only when sound is just sound it is percievable as that what it really is: a temporal phenomenon – audible time. Klaus Lang sees time as the genuine material of a composer and at the same time also the fundamental content of music. In his view musical material is time perceived through sound, the object of music is the experience of time through listening. Music is time made audible.

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