With the Match Cut Festival, Zafraan Ensemble has developed a format that combines music, discussion and play into an intense concert experience. It provides an insight into Berlin’s vibrant and diverse music scene, with a particular focus on the intersections and blends of different musical expressions and styles. The musicians of Zafraan Ensemble, as specialists in New Music, invite ensembles that are at home in other, distant musical worlds. They enter into a musical exchange and together explore the question of how something new can emerge from the encounter of foreign musical languages. Specific compositions are commissioned that bring together the instrumentations of Zafraan and the other participating ensembles. Likewise, the participating ensembles also appear separately with selected works in their genuine forms of expression.
Zafraan stands for music that reflects today’s life, today’s society, today’s reality in all its facets. Together with other art forms, Zafraan observes, explores and processes what surrounds us: the people, the events, the nature, the technologies, the normalities and the absurdities of today. Consisting of ten permanent instrumentalists from Spain, France, New Zealand, Australia and Germany, the grassroots organized group formed in Berlin in 2009 and performs preferably current repertoire covered by the core instrumentation of violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, clarinet, saxophone, harp, piano and percussion. The musicians challenge themselves and the audience, try out and surprise. In collaboration with conductors such as Titus Engel or Manuel Nawri, with artists such as Chiharu Shiota, Aliénor Dauchez and Louise Wagner, with composers such as Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Alexander Schubert, Elena Mendoza, Stefan Keller, Johannes Borowski, Eres Holz and Helmut Oehring, they push themselves to the limit, provoke, risk and create something new. In doing so, Zafraan unleashes the narrative power of music to bring to life what needs to be told.
After excursions into the realms of jazz, progressive rock, noise, electro and oriental music in previous years, Zafraan Ensemble invites the techno formation Brandt Brauer Frick as well as the renowned Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin to the Kühlhaus Berlin for a musical exchange with the third edition of the festival in summer 2022. With premieres and classics, in solo sets and mixed ensembles, they will jointly explore the interfaces of the most diverse musical worlds.
A diverse supporting program throughout the Kühlhaus will also make the festival a special participatory experience, including the interactive concert installation “Like Tears in Rain” by Yoav Pasovsky. Here, the audience itself is involved in the musical experimentation. They will have the opportunity to put musicians from all three participating formations into a dialogue according to their own ideas and to help shaping the real-time score via a terminal.
The Match Cut Map by Josa Gerhard and Sebastian Quack from the Invisible Playground network enables musicians and audience members from the different scenes to meet and engage in lively discussion and exchange of experiences. An additional playful element will motivate the audience to interact directly with each other. At the entrance, visitors will be given a sticker with an individual QR code that they can wear on their clothing. After scanning each other’s QR codes, the task is then to assess the other person according to type and musical taste and to assign listening biographies to them.
An open, inspiring atmosphere is created throughout the Kühlhaus by the scenographic concept of set designer and graphic artist Julia Rommel, who combines all elements into a coherent overall experience.
Match Cut Festival 2022
25.6.2022 | Doors 17:00 CET | Starts 18:00 CET
Kühlhaus Berlin | Luckenwalder Straße 3 | 10963 Berlin
zafraanensemble.com | Event @ Facebook | Tickets
