Glanzkoffer (Kathrin Grenzdörffer)
Genetic choir & Tanja Smit
Wooden Strings Duo (Aldo Aranda & Sarah Nichols)
Binmatu (Jonas Gruska)
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Glanzkoffer (Kathrin Grenzdörffer)
Based on her own field recording journeys, Glanzkoffer exploits the poetic potential of everyday sounds. She programs these fragments to become a crucial part of her experimental songwriting, where sonic aesthetics get invited by catchy tunes. Her most recent pieces are inspired by the sound of people and machines working. www.sonoscoop.com
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Genetic Choir and Tanja Smit – voices and images
Tanja Smit creates drawings based on printed texts in books and newspaper-articles. Printed words become image. The Genetic Choir creates music from fragments of reality around them, for example the sounds they hear in the performance space. Both are exploring structures and patterns that lie hidden underneath the foremost layer of existing things. Smit,´s drawings are in fact graphic scores, asking to be played. The past year Smit and the Choir cooperated in a workshop and some try-outs, with interesting results. In this concert, the singers of the Genetic Choir will newly investigate the text scores of which some will be projected for the audience. Together, we will explore the relationship between written words, image, structures and music.
The Genetic Choir is a vocal ensemble that performs concerts without having prepared any music beforehand. The vocalists train themselves as a musical organism, a small human society that interacts in spontaneous sound, becoming music. The music of the Genetic Choir is related to chaos theory, complexity and the self-organizing principles of interrelated nodes in a living network. Genetic Choir compositions create meaning and beauty from seeming randomness, not unlike genes that multiply and mutate, or oscillators that sync with each other after a certain tipping point. Starting point and frame of the compositions can differ per project, but the music always incorporates the reality at hand: the architecture and acoustics of the building, the people present, accidental things that the vocalists hear, sense, smell. In 2012, working with graphic scores and singing compositions on food (taste-scores) have been new, exciting developments of the Choir. See our website: www.genetic-choir.org Singers in this project are Alexandra de Groot, Amazone Nativel, Anita Kooij, Gabriëlle Barros Martins, Hans Paape, Jeannette Huizinga, Marjolijn Roeleveld, Peter Huber, Tanaquil Schuttel, Thomas Johannsen, Yinske Silva.
Tanja Smit is a Dutch visual artist who, apart from images, works with language and music. After finishing studies painting and drawing at the KABK she started up her artist´s practice in The Hague and later moved to Barcelona, Spain, where she resided 16 years. Since 2009 she is based again in The Hague. Her “textimages” consist of simple, repetitive manual interventions that show underlying and new structures and meanings of the text, and are drawn directly upon it. They have been showed in exhibitions on display tables, by means of projections or reprints on banners.Their use as scores started in 2006 with a cooperation with composer Christopher Williams and the ensemble Chronophonie from Freiburg, Germany. In 2009 her work was part of “Possibility of Action, the Life of the Score”, an historic exhibition on graphic scores in Barcelona´s MACBA museum. www.tanjasmit.com. In the Netherlands she cooperates on a regular basis with composer/performer Anne Wellmer and a small group of composers/performers united in MILE, the Music In Language Ensemble. The cast and size of MILE differs depending the occasion. Next to Wellmer and Smit participants have been Orlando Aguilar, Jelte van Andel, Ángel Faraldo, Marie Guilleray, Anne La Berge, Mateo Marangoni, Sandra Pujols and Cora Schmeiser. In the cooperation with the Genetic Choir the emphasis lies on the improvisatory and harmonic aspects of the scores.
Thomas Johannsen is founder of the Genetic Choir and works as interdisciplinary performer and director on the boundaries of music, dance and theatre. For more of his work see: www.thojoh.com. He initiated a regular research+training space in Amsterdam, which is run by the international community of improvisers: “The Carpet Sessions” are inviting professionals of any discipline to share their work, train their craft and conduct research projects on improvisation. The same website hosts an interdisciplinary improvisation knowledge base, which is meant as a growing wikipedia for improvisation principles and concepts. The project is open to anyone in the field to join and contribute. www.instantcomposition.org
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Wooden Strings Duo (Aldo Aranda & Sarah Nichols)
The beguilingly named Wooden Strings duo was founded in the Netherlands in 2010 by Mexican percussionist Aldo Aranda and French-British harpist Sarah Nichols. The duo produces unique and unusual combinations of sound, stemming from a mix of cultures, and the use of a wide range of instruments. The Wooden Strings arsenal of instruments boasts four different harps – the pedal harp, the Celtic, the Celtic-electric and the kora (African harp) – as well as percussion instruments such as, marimba, vibraphone and a large range of Latin-American, Asian and African percussions. In fact, they collect and use any items, even toys and rare objects that have an intriguing sound. Their versatility as performers allows them to experiment with all musical genres, from baroque, classical, pop and jazz through to contemporary and electro-acoustic music. They’re also involved in exploring other art forms, such as dance, film and theatre, and are always on the lookout for unusual and interesting concert venues in order to reach a wider audience. In their constant quest to expand their repertoire in new directions, they’re always on the search for collaborators, eager to work with composers from all over the world and promote new compositions for harp and percussion. Currently, Aldo and Sarah are working with Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, and Australian composer Jessica Wells. Wooden Strings have had an exciting start with an invitation to perform at the Eleventh World Harp Congress in Vancouver (Canada) in 2011 and more recently at the HIFA Festival 2012 (Harare International Festival of the Arts, Zimbabwe). A concert tour in the Netherlands, Belgium and France is planned for 2012, as well as a performance at the Foro Internacional De Musica Nueva Manuel Enríquez in Mexico City in 2013. They are also beginning work on their debut CD album.
Aldo Aranda, graduated on Marimba and minor Composition at the Flemish Royal Conservatory in Antwerp, Belgium; and in Contemporary Percussion with a minor in Sonology and Composition at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague, Netherlands, also specialized in Music-Theater-Percussion at the Fontys Conservatory, Tilburg, Netherlands. Awarded with honourable mentions in the 1st and 2nd Contest and International Festival of Marimba Players in Mexico, Aranda has premiered more than 15 different pieces from Latin American, Asian and European composers and has commissioned new works to renowned young composers. He has made several tours in Asia, Europe and Africa and given recitals and concerts in the main halls of Mexico City and other states of the republic, as well as being invited to the most prestigious festivals such as “Festival de Avignon”, “Aarhus festival”, “Gaudeamus Music week”, “Netherlands Music Days”, “Sonic Visions”, “Cervantino International Festival”. He has also colaborated and performed on a Worldwide Tour with the Theater Company “Troubleyn” and the artist, sculptor and director Jan Fabre with the production “History of Tears”. Aranda also collaborated with renowned ensembles, choreographers, conductors, composers and companies in contemporary and classical music such as Placido Domingo, Neeme Jarvi, Asko Schoenberg Ensemble, Louis Andriessen, Erich Sleichem, LOOS ensemble, Cora Bos- Kroese, Gabriela Ortiz and Heiner Gobbels. Recently he has created a new duet with harpist Sarah Nichols called “Wooden Strings”, based in Holland that has been invited to the World Harp Congress in Vancouver, Canada and more recently to HIFA International Festival in Harare, Zimbabwe in 2012.
Sarah Nichols, born and educated in Paris where her parents settled, is the daughter of a Rhodesian (now Zimbabwean) mother and a Welsh Patagonian father. She puts her love of travel and her interest in exotic climes and people down to this unusual heritage, in which she grew up bilingual and seeing the world from an early age. Sarah plays regularly as a soloist and in ensembles for various events. She has a harp and percussion duo called “Wooden Strings”, with Mexican percussionist Aldo Aranda. Sarah also has a harp, flute and percussion trio of music and storytelling, with French flutist Gaëlle Dohen and Mexican percussionist Aldo Aranda. They are preparing a CD album of folk stories form around the world with music they created together. Parallel with her career as a performing artist, Sarah is also a committed and enthusiastic teacher. She is involved with various music educational groups such as MEMO (Memorabele Momenten), which encourages children to discover music through daily interactive performances; and “Wonderland” which offers music and dance improvisation concerts for children. Sarah has also founded an educational project called “Modern Troubadours”, a series of music and storytelling workshops. This project took place in Romania and the Netherlands in 2012 and will take place in Nepal, Zimbabwe and South Africa in 2013. www.sarahnicholsharp.weebly.com
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Binmatu (Jonas Gruska)
Binmatu is an audiovisual experience. Psychedelic auralism resonating from stellar atmospheres. Sound oscillates between physical and etheric with speed of quartz crystals. Fine tune your eyes and open your ears. Auditory cortex glitches may occur.
Binmatu is a project of Jonas Gruska. Born in Czechoslovakia. Recently studying composition in Krakow (PL) and Institute of Sonology in The Hague (NL). Works mostly with computers and electronics as a musician and sound artist. He has authored interactive poems and visual performances, and is also a developer of open source computer instruments and artistic software. Gave workshops on city sonification and programming for artists. Performed and exhibited his work in Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia.