Kleiner Wasserspeicher, Diedenhofer Straße, Prenzlauer Berg
(U Senefelderplatz)


Interventions



21.09. 8 pm
Steamboat Switzerland feat. Michael Wertmüller and Lieder (Switzerland, Germany) Dominik Blum (hammond-organ, korg ms 20), Marino Pliakas (bass) Lucas Niggli (drums, percussion), special guests: Michael Wertmüller (percussion), Lieder - Ex-Alboth (voice)

The power of a fully cranked up Hammond organ, an electric bass distorted to unrecognizability and a thrashing drum set! Driven on by a high pressure mix of metal riffs, contemporary sound material and free improvisation, the steamboat wraps its own noise disturbances up in strangely moving harmonies. And it's crashing and sputtering quite violently in the machine room! Steamboat Switzerland works in such a way that joins new music, improvisation and elements from rock music together to investigate new integrative narrative forms above and beyond the simple crossover.



22.09. 8 pm
Immersion 4
Germany/Australia Part I – Audio/Visual Live Performances
(See also October 4 in the Ballhaus Naunynstraße)

Immersion 4 is a series of live concerts (See also October 4 in the Ballhaus Naunynstraße) that explore the practice of live audio-visual presentations. Australian and German video/media artists and musicians investigate the improvisational exchange of image, sound and space. They bring new methods of articulation and aesthetic understanding of the narrative and abstract processes of visualization together with improvised and experimental musical forms. An important component is the way in which the musicians sculpt the space with the parameters of performance through multi-channel diffusion or the positioning of performers in space to create a powerful listening experience. The project presents five groups of artists who have developed works for the small water reservoir:

Jan Jacob Hofmann (electronics, live surround electronic), Dominic Redfern (live video)

The sounds, forms, movement, colors, surfaces and materials of the water reservoir will be assigned to their respective media and used for a communal creation: Jan Jacob Hofmann works with the sound spatialization method Ambisonic which allows for a precise localization of the most varied of sound materials in space, regardless of the position of the loudspeakers. Starting point for the piece is the space and its reverberation time of up to 12 seconds. Rhythmic impulses are introduced deep into the space from different directions, acoustically surveying the space. The natural echo of the space enters into a dialog with the synthetically produced sound material, which was modulated from the reverb information of the space in advance. The echo of the space complements the rhythms of the electronic composition. Dominic Redfern works with video material that he recorded on site. Content and meaning of the visual and sonic material emerge again transformed in the other medium.

Michael Vorfeld (Percussion), Reinhold Friedl (inside piano), Philip Samartzis (live electronics, surround sound mix), Lillevän (Video)

The duo Reinhold Friedl/Michael Vorfeld meets Philip Samartzis, electronic musician from Melbourne, to play at the water reservoir together. Lillevän, who has already collaborated with Friedl and his ensemble Zeitkratzer in a variety of contexts will provide the visuals. A minimalist but extremely sensual audio/visual event! It goes without saying that surround sound as well as surround video are part of the game.

Marc Behrens Behrens (electronics, live surround electronic), Philip Brophy (liveelectronics, surround sound mix), Springer _ Parker - Ex Candela 2 (live-video)

Inspired by Pierre Henry, these artists pose the question of silence in sound, the black pause in the image and their interaction. A method of creating focus is the spatialization of sound image projection. A ping pong between the musicians and video artists permits combinations from solo to ensemble performance of all participants, symmetrically and asymmetrically. The performance is divided into non-linearly arranged blocks whose individual improvised parts are sometimes integrated into the sound, sometimes only into the image.

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23.09. 8 pm
Immersion 4
Germany/Australia Part II – Audio/Visual Live Performances

Philip Brophy Brophy (live electronics, surround sound mix), Philip Samartzis (live electronics, surround sound mix), Dominic Redfern (live video)

HEAT tours the Australian landscape's broken heart via live audio/visual corrosions of its romantic status. The three artists stretch and collapse the correspondence of sound and image to draq out the contaminants that lie beneath the terrain's troubled surface, collapsing Australia's wide brown land into a series of close and breathless moments. Combining field recordings, live video, percussion and gritty electronics, HEAT abstracts and aetheticizes problematic elements of the Austalian ecology in poetic renderings of movement and stasis. The artists are interested in the two-dimensionality of images and the three-dimensionality of sounds. Dominic Redfern is one of Australia's leading video artists. He improvises with image material in relation to the sounds provided by the musicians, edits, mixes and transforms them with special effects. He takes over the formal and structural ideas of the music and integrates them into his live video improvisation. The sounds and images are transformed and distributed throughout the space in such a way that they transmit an illusion of reality to the visitor, breaking through the impression that they might be sitting in a movie theatre. What happens if the hierarchy between sound and image falls away and all elements become equal?

Kirsten Reese sound, electronics, Dominik Busch visuals
Abglanz for mobile lamp and loudspeaker, Musterfolien, 4 channel audio

Abglanz refers to the space and the symmetric forms of the water reservoir. Patterns were derived from the six-sided ground plan which form the basis for the visual and acoustic patterns of the performance. "Media without media" is the concept that the visual level follows: network-like structures are projected and superimposed onto the walls of the water reservoir from a light source – without using a video or slide projector. On the acoustic level, patterns are created from multifarious noise sounds which are likewise derived from the visual patterns. These are projected into the space with a mobile loudspeaker. Interferences arise from the reflections in the space and the superimposition of sounds that are projected from the fixed loudspeakers. As on the visual level, sound movement is created through the movement of the performer, the sound and light sources and, last but not least, the movement of the public.

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24.09. 8 pm
Christoph Winkler We Are Time (Premiere)
Dance work by Christoph Winkler (Germany)
(one-time "site-specific adaption for the Wasserspeicher)
Music: Tony Conrad "Four Violins", Dance: Zufit Simon (Israel)
(See also Sept. 19 Ballhaus Naunynstraße)

Charles Curtis (USA)
Eliane Radigue Naldjorlak (2005) for cello solo
(See also Oct. 2 Ballhaus Naunynstraße)

Created in close collaboration with Charles Curtis, Naldjorlak is the first entirely acoustic composition by a composer who has pioneered pure electronic sound for over thirty years. Delicate, yet dense and highly diffuse sonorities are seamlessly interwoven in a three-part structure, mirroring the geography of the cello. The hidden untamed Ur-sonority of the cello is revealed in all its sonic complexity and fragility. The Tibetan title refers to the motion of all life toward unity. Qualities of intense focus, concentration and spirituality, landmarks in all of Radigue's work, are transferred from the composer's electronic studio to the concert stage.
French composer Eliane Radigue has pioneered pure analog synthesis since the late fifties. Working with analog tape and a custom ARP synthesizer, she has created a unique body of work described by the New York Times as "a steady stream of sonic activity taking place right at the edge of one's perception". For decades she has been a kind of underground luminary, and in recent years her work has exercised a decisive influence on a younger generation of musicians working with electronics within a minimalist aesthetic.





26.09. 8 pm
Rendez-vous ZEBRA: Poetry Meets Film

At the nexus of poetry and film: The poetry film combines the image worlds of cinema with the linguistic condensation of poetry. The best ZEBRA poetry films of the world will be projected – a preview of the 3rd ZEBRA Poetry Film Award in October 2006. The ZEBRA has established itself as the largest forum for the international poetry film and gives filmmakers the world over the opportunity to exchange ideas and define directions. The festival provides a platform for a dynamic short film genre that has developed between literature, film and new media to an independent art form. Various special programs, an international colloquium and a comprehensive retrospective supplement the 3rd ZEBRA Poetry Film Award.
A project of the literaturWerkstatt Berlin. www.literaturwerkstatt.org





28.09. 8 pm
Jean-Francois Laporte und Martin Ouellet (Canada, Québec)
Khôra and FlyingCan Duo
Concert installation with self-constructed instruments

Parallel to his compositional activities, Jean François Laporte is dedicated to the discovery and development of "primitive" musical instruments, builds sound installations and experiments with the possibilities of chance, experimental and improvised music.
"Khôra":area surrounding an agglomeration; indeterminate space as opposed to man-organized space. Scattered across the site, the vibrations of twenty or so invented instruments bathe the public in their movements. The Tu-Yo, Bowl, Flying Can, Sax-trunk and Siren Organ are all born of an extremely simple assemblage of basic materials, bringing the art of sound back to its genesis, freed of the weight of traditional instruments and of the music associated with them. Unaltered sounds of surprising depth, unamplified and unprocessed "hyper-real" character that borders on the unreal. No speakers or microphones are hidden behind the vibrating membranes of the instruments. The instruments create music from mass and movement, based on the fluctuating evolution of similar timbres organizing themselves by accumulation and proliferation, fostering the birth of an extremely organic sound universe for which the water reservoir provides the ideal place to expand.






29.09. 8 pm
Ensemble Zwischentöne (Germany)
Breaking Barriers
Dorothee Sporbeck, Natalia Pschenitschnikova (flutes), Kristina Lösche-Löwensen (violin), Augustin Maurs (violoncello), Volker Schindel & Helles Weber (accordion), Kurt König (percussion), Chiyoko Szlavnics (sinus tones)
Alvin Lucier: "Heavier Than Air" for 4 speakers, balloons, CO2
Peter Ablinger: "Weiss/weisslich 22" electronics
Christina Kubisch: "Akustische Vermessungen" for 4 Actors, stones, vases, electronics
Nader Mashayekhi: "0 + eine Nacht" for flute, accordion, percussion, violoncello
Chiyoko Szlavnics "Reservoir" for 7 instruments and sinus tones with live video by Els van Riel)

The Ensemble Zwischentöne established itself through a repertoire of pieces created since the beginning of the sixties in which unusual instruments, locations, performance practices or forms of notation were the focus of investigation. With the performance series Breaking Barriers! Verify! Activate!, the ensemble puts into question the myth of the concert audience. What is a concert? What is an audience? What does "communication" mean in music? One concert from this series will be presented during this festival. The pieces chosen correspond almost perfectly to the spatial circumstances, in this case, the small water reservoir. Chiyoko Szlavnics' 30 minute piece is based on a series of drawings which create aural bundles of critical bands, concentrated in different areas of the complex acoustical space of the Wasserspeicher. The audience sits in the center, surrounded by sound, which moves as water once might have moved in this space. The music reveals the acoustic resonance of the space as the full spectrum of frequencies moves through the Wasserspeicher over the course of 30 minutes. Acoustic instruments and sine tones fuse with one another to create shimmering waves of beating, highlighted by the individual instruments' timbres, and paralleled in the live-video exploration of the space, which is projected back into the space by Belgian artist Els van Riel.





30.09. 8 pm
Quatuor Bozzini (Canada, Québec)
(See also October 2 in Ballhaus Naunynstraße)
Martin Arnold: "Aberrare" (casting) premier of a new version
Malcolm Goldstein: "A New Song Of Many Faces For In These Times"
Marc Sabat: "Beautiful City" (1994)
Jean Francois Laporte: "Quatuor #2" (in collaboration with Quatuor Bozzini)