The 4th UMLAUT Festival für gegenwärtige Musik covers a wide range of contemporary and experimental music from Berlin and beyond, including dance, performance and installations.
UMLAUT is a global network of individual artists from the field of contemporary / improvised / experimental musics who together form an organization around the independent label UMLAUT Records.
The newly formed Trio Transmitter ensemble premieres two pieces that deal with contemporary music in an interdisciplinary context: a commission by the Spanish composer Nuria Núñez Hierro and a piece of ensemble founder Florian Bergmann.
It is the starting point of the two pieces, to find an individual perspective on music in relation to other media. The concert performance becomes the subject of not only acoustic, but also visual and performative questions.
The collaboration of Axel Dörner, Seijiro Murayama and Takako Suzuki entitled “Shidoro-modoro” is structured by words derived from Japanese Onomatopoeia.
The Japanese language has the highest number of those compared to all other languages. The onomatopoeic terms used in the performance are the starting point for the abstracted sounds and actions of the musicians and the dancer.
Die Hochstapler means something like the impostors. In this project, the musicians work on two great american composers with revolutionary visions of music, musicology, philosophy, life: Anthony Braxton and Ornette Coleman. They are using their compositions and concepts to create their own music; they do not copy them, they steal them, they re-structurate the ideas according to theirs, exploring a labyrinth of notes and thoughts and improvisation, questioning the music sheets as a flexible material.
The fourth part of this project will be performed at UMLAUT Festival Berlin with a double quartet, a formation that both Braxton and Ornette explored in different ways. Die Hochstapler invited the french-german-swedisch quartet Peeping Tom to join them in this adventure. Die Hochstapler vs Peeping Tom or Die Hochstapler + Peeping Tom?
Tomoko Sauvage, Japanese musician / sound artist based in Paris, has been working on waterbowls, porcelain bowls of different sizes, filled with water and amplified with under-water microphones (H2a-XLR/aquarianaudio). She plays with drops, waves and bubbles resonating in the bowls as well as audio feedback creating waving drones and natural overtones.
Her work is about the delicate balance between controlled and uncontrolled with random percussion of droplets, acoustic characteristics of the space and the fragile tonality created with the fluid materials constantly evaporating and moving. In 2011, a new set of porcelain bowls was created during her residency at La Pommerie (FR) in collaboration with Ceramic Research Center in Limoges (CRAFT).
The Ensemble “6” is made of members of groups like The Silencers, Obliq, Konzert Minimal and The New Silence – names that speak for themselves.
In dialouge with the room acoustics the music of the sextet is based on silence and long developments. The music moves in slow pace and what might seem small details soon unfolds to be the essence of a delicate, yet intense experience.
Frank Gratkowski and Matthias Schubert first met in 1983 in Hamburg. Since then, their
musical ways have crossed again and again in different places and a variety of bands until eventually they both moved to Berlin.
The affinity they discovered in the various groups they had played in finally led to the formation of the duo in 1996. Both musicians see themselves not only as Jazz musicians, but try to translate all the influences of other musics of their interest into their own musical language.
Michal Fuchs’ “Flood” is after Hannes Lingens’ solo piece ‘Flut’. The sound which gradually filled the room reminded Fuchs of Thousands of crickets organized and composed into a geometrical shape, a chaos within an order and everything is very gentle and complex.
NiKo LFO is a Berlin based musician, producer and visual artist faithful to UMLAUT Berlin for whom he designs cover artworks, posters and flyers since 2009. Responding to the festival’s invitation NiKo presents Biomass (1. Dreaming, 2. Mapping), whose topic could be but not necessarily: a psychotic attempt to see right through the Self and the Universe.
This event is highly recommended by Digital in Berlin! We are giving away 2 x 2 tickets for the event on friday in Ballhaus Ost. Just send a mail to win@digitalinberlin.de with “Umlaut Festival 2013” as the subject.
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Umlaut Festival 2013
Friday: Trio Transmitter, “Shidoro-Modoro”, Die Hochstapler & Peeping Tom
Saturday: Tomoko Sauvage, “6”, Gratkowski/Schubert
and “Flood/Biomass” Exhibition by Michal Fuchs & NiKo LFO (at Ausland)
presented by Digital in Berlin
Friday, 12 April 2013 | 19:00 CET | Ballhaus Ost
Saturday, 13 April 2013 | 20:00 CET | Ausland
Ballhaus Ost | Pappelallee 15 | 10437 Berlin/Prenzlauer Berg
Ausland | Lychener Straße 60 | 10437 Berlin/Prenzlauer Berg
ballhausost.de | ausland-berlin.de | umlautrecords.com
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