Splitter Orchester @ Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus Berlin | Monday, 17.03.2014

The members of the Splitter Orchester are a fiercely independent collection of instrument builders, jazz musicians, vaudvillians, contemporary composers, interpreters, tap dancers and conceptual artists. They hail from many different and diverse countries as Italy, Israel, Mexico, Australia, USA, Norway, Austria, UK and of course, Germany.

The SO is a seemingly disparate group united by a commitment to creative sound. This group started a large improvising orchestra in Sydney in 2002, drawing from a collegial but unconnected group of grass-roots organizations – the NOW now, What is Music? And Impermanent Audio.

The group was already well aware of the major social, political and musical contributions of The Sun Ra Arkestra, The Scratch Orchestra, The Globe Unity Orchestra, and the Jazz Composer Orchestra, so it just seemed like the natural thing to do. They named it The Splinter Orchestra – a mass made up of break-aways.

For eight years the Splinter Orchestra had expanded and contracted from a core of 15, to a mass of 55 – working as a kind of collective workshop for those interested in the finer points of composing for improvisers, to those who were improvising for the first time. The SO expanded a lot of minds and relationships, and disturbed a lot of others.

Through organising the NOW now festival and entering the ferment of ‘Improvised Music’ the artists of the SO discovered an enormous community of musicians and thinkers working around the world – and shared their experience, knowledge and enthusiasm with them.

They were told us of a utopian city, where bass players sip on latte’s, where Mexican sound artists make a fortune breaking technology, and playing out of tune is grounds for a PHD. BERLIN!

The explosive population of creative musicians in this city makes an Orchestra of this kind possible – and with listening and playing habits so dramatically shifted in the past ten years, there seems to be an opportunity to make a group music that has never before been heard.

Thanks to the incredible efforts of Gregor Hotz, the formation of a Berlin based orchestra (now named Splitter Orchester) was able to happen in a way that was consistent with the own wishes of the SO – to not only work with a group of considerable size, but also to make that a plausible professional engagement for the artists they wished to invite.