The concert agency Palais Wittgenstein (which emerged from the CTM festival) starts a new concert series dedicated to the atmospheric orchestration of space – taking place in a new big off-location in the center of the city. The first event presents the Minimal Studies Festival, an evening curated by Hanno Leichtmann, and featuring Stephan Mathieu, The Pitch and Leichtmann himself.
Under the unassuming title of „Minimal Studies“, electronic musician Hanno Leichtmann investigates the remnants of the minimal music movement of the 1970s and catches some of its still audible echoes.
The album begins with the pulse of an organ, a deep, low bass slides in, layer-by-layer the piece builds. The American music psychologist Diana Deutsch proved that any sound becomes a melody if it is repeated often enough. This is exactly the phenomenon we encounter here; we suddenly hear melodies and are not sure if they were there before, if they are there now or where they came from.
Hanno Leichtmann | Minimal Studies
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=suWKHUolSPs
And yet Leichtmann’s music is not based on gushing euphony or psychoacoustic effects. Instead it restricts itself to basics by combining the repetitive structures of minimal music with elements of once groundbreaking Berlin club music.
Rhythmic impulses taken from soundtracks and contemporary music samples, a John Carpenter bass, are accompanied by acoustic instruments (violin, organ, clarinet, trumpet) that play melodic patterns, which disappear in the flow of sound, becoming ever harder to discern.
Hanno Leichtmann | Dazwischen
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=8MQEUgnJ2wk
Pop-minimal music; meandering chord/rhythm loops, experimental turntable manipulation basslines, it’s all there: Steve Reichs asynchronous patterns, Pole’s minimal dub, Nic Collins’and Yasunao Tone’s broken CD players, Terry Riley’s organs, Oval’s systemische clicks’n’cuts, LaMonte Young’s drones, Michael Nyman’s early film scores… Vast monotone landscapes emerge, subliminal disco bass, idling synthesizers, barely-there electronic percussion, and occasional instrumental melodies. Hyper-minimalism on display.
What can be done with this material after it’s been reduced to it’s universal forms? Suddenly, sound patterns like landscapes from Tarkowski’s films emerge: a strangely nebulous unreality consisting all that is farmiliar, but all newly mixed together (including a monolithic guitar riff as an obituary for Sonic Youth) until the sound of bells and a few scant piano melodies take over and finally fade away. Music about music.
Stephan Mathieu | Dawn
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=X1FOeWzXTdo
Stephan Mathieu is a musician based in Saarbrücken, Germany. He is a a self taught composer and performer of his own music, working in the fields of electroacoustics and abstract digitala.
His sound is largely based on historical instruments, environmental sound and obsolete media, which are recorded and transformed by means of experimental microphony, re-editing techniques and software processes involving spectral analysis and convolution; it has been compared to the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the work of Colorfield artists Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.
The Pitch | Frozen Orchestra
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=40Pto6vH9HM
The Pitch has created a personal musical language and a body of work ranging from quartet music to extended, large scale ensemble pieces involving guest musicians and further conceptual elements. Improvisation is an important element in their music. it is used as a generative device within specific shapes, structures and ideas for different pieces of music.
Their piece ‘Frozen Orchestra’ focuses on slowly changing textures, pitch-set constellations and the subtle blending of instruments. As a Quartet they are currently engaged in what they call ‘Liquid Music’ which focusses on Pattern based structures and more rhythmic interplay in an environment of prescribed pitch combinations and specific kinds of interaction.
This event is highly recommended by Digital in Berlin! We are giving away 3 x 2 tickets. Just send a mail to win@digitalinberlin.de with “Minimal Studies Festival” as the subject.
Minimal Studies Festival w/ Hanno Leichtmann, Stephan Mathieu & The Pitch LIVE
Saturday, 23 November 2013 | 20:00 CET
HO | Holzmarktstr. 66 | 10179 Berlin/Mitte
hannoleichtmann.com | bitsteam.de | soundcloud.com/t-h-e-p-i-t-c-h | hoberlin.de
