I'm very happy to be back in Darmstadt for the biannual new music festival! Aside from meeting many old and new friends. I have two performances lined up during the festival:
Zwerm will create, Commodity Music, an evening long performance/installation by François Sarhan at a site specific location (the Darmstadt Design house near Mathildenhöhe), in collaboration with La Muse en Circuit:
For the Darmstadt Summer Course 2016, Sarhan and the belgian electric guitar quartet ZWERM will present a house full of music: An installation concert with live music, pre-recorded music, some pre-recorded images, and a combination of them all. Commodity Music is centered around the fact that the separation of tasks and competences in our society has reached a point never seen before. In music, this phenomenon could be caricatured this way: music is composed by people who don't play, performed by people who don't compose, and listened to (in case) by people who neither compose nor play. Instead of bringing (in an idealistic way) the community of listeners towards music, Commodity Music proposes different attempts of bringing performers back to useful and reasonable tasks that could be of some use for the community.
Then it's off to Frankfurt to join Ictus for a performance of Eva Reiter's fantastic work Lichtenberg Figures at Frankfurt LAB:
The second guest appearance by Ictus at this year’s Summer Course will bring The Lichtenberg Figures to Darmstadt – the latest, evening-long work for voice and 11 instruments by the Austrian composer Eva Reiter. In this highly energetic piece, Reiter opens up a musical space populated, in a very personal and idiosyncratic manner and a sometimes bizarre concentration, with sounds both acoustic and electronic, distorted and defamiliarized, processed and natural, vocal and instrumental. Although the composer, in her cycle of seven songs, six interludes and a prologue, sets up a frame of reference rich in metaphors and images by nameing and incorporating Ben Lerner’s cycle of poems The Lichtenberg Figures(published in 2004), she is ultimately concerned with a musical-sonic “social psychogram” (Eva Reiter). Thus the highly complex and highly virtuosic Lichtenberg Figures operate on the dark threshold of our perception of the world, where hallucinations, deprivations, abysses, despair and aberrations are an entirely natural part of things…
Maybe see you at one of these events!
