silent green 1

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Mazen Kerbaj
With a Little Help From My Friends I: Lungless

In the mid-1990s, I was studying illustration and graphic design at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts while also publishing comics in local magazines. It was during this time that my friend, guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui, gave me a trumpet he had no use for. Although I had no prior experience playing any instrument, I went on to develop a very personal approach to the trumpet, creating my own techniques by using everyday objects to prepare and transform the instrument, completely altering both its form and sound.

Three decades later, following a sabbatical year in 2024, I am setting the trumpet aside and exploring two new instruments, both invented by close friends: the late musician and instrument inventor Michel Waisvisz and sound artist Tarek Atoui. These explorations led to the creation of two new solo works: “From One War to Another” and “Lungless”. Though radically different in form, both compositions evoke the trauma of the many wars I lived through, from my childhood in Beirut to my present days in Berlin, two cities once scarred by division and conflict.

For his “Reverse Collection” project, Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui invited several improvising musicians from Berlin and Beirut in 2015 to explore the Dahlem Museum’s collection of ancient, folkloric and ethnic instruments. I was among the guest musicians and spent two days applying my self-invented techniques and preparations for the trumpet to a range of old wind instruments from various cultures around the world. Based on the recordings from this initial phase of the project, Atoui later created new instruments, which were showcased in 2018 at the Tate Modern, where they were played by another group of improvising musicians from London.

In 2020, Atoui invited musicians from Berlin to play these new instruments at a private event in the small town of Güldenhof, Brandenburg. I was part of the ensemble, and finally discovered the outcome of a process I had been involved in five years earlier. I was particularly drawn to “Les Trompes de Poutine” (“Putin’s Horns”), an instrument built for Atoui by Thierry Madiot, consisting of five trunks controlled by air valves that produce sounds strikingly similar to his own. In 2022, I spent a week in Güldenhof exploring the instrument’s possibilities, which led me to conceive a modified version capable of transforming into six simultaneously playable prepared trumpets.

The modified instrument was built between 2024 and 2025 and was named “Putin’s Organ”, in reference to the Soviet multiple rocket launcher used in World War II, which German troops nicknamed “Stalin’s Organ” (“Stalinorgel”). This infamous rocket launcher was heavily in use during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). During those fifteen years, rockets were the only objects that could easily cross the Green Line, which divided Beirut into two parts, isolated by barricades and checkpoints. I was born in the same year as the civil war began, and grew up in the predominantly Christian East Beirut, while Atoui was raised in West Beirut. The two of us, who could never have met in their childhood, were first introduced to each other in 2007 by Michel Waisvisz in Amsterdam.

“Lungless” is a composition born from the painful nostalgia of childhood during the civil war. From my voluntary exile in the once-divided city of Berlin where the spectre of war is following me, I evoke memories of East Beirut, another fractured city where I grew up, often fantasising about its other half. After the war, the previously unbridgeable communication gap between the inhabitants of the two sides was gradually overcome by the realisation of how similarly they had experienced the conflict, particularly in terms of the shared soundscapes that defined their lives. The title “Lungless” should be understood both literally (the sound is generated by an air compressor) and figuratively (the inability to speak in the face of war’s violence). Additionally, it adds a deeper layer of meaning to the “organ” in the instrument’s name.

– Mazen Kerbaj

With

Mazen Kerbaj – Putin’s Organ

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Ty Bouque: Seated at the Throat

Georges Aperghis: Quatorze Jactations

Jactation (n.):
1. A tossing or swinging of the body to and fro; spec. in Pathology (1699–)
2. Boasting, bragging, ostentatious display (1576–)
From the Latin “jactātiōn-em”, noun of action from “jactāre”, to throw, toss about, discuss, boast of
– From Oxford English Dictionary

Evan Johnson: A general interrupter to ongoing activity

“A general interrupter to ongoing activity” is a study of the voice as an instrument that is uniquely capable of occluding itself. This occlusion takes place on a number of levels: the noisily tongue-blocked airflow of fricative and sibilant consonants, which comprise the fundamental sonic material of the piece; the diffusion of the text’s vowels into whistles and hisses, as more or less destructive background colorations; and the fragile compromises necessitated by an overloaded structure wherein almost every physical effort partially overwrites every other. The result is a navigation of the boundary between audible and inaudible, communicable and private, vocal and muscular.
The text, an anonymous Middle English versification of a passage from Augustine’s “Confessions”, is meant as both an evocative epigraph and a source of occlusive possibilities and repetitive structures:

Thole [ie., “wait”] yet, thole a litel
But yet and yet was endeles 
And thole a litel a long wey is

– Evan Johnson

Timothy McCormack: Seated at the Throat

song i
Beyond the mouth,
Swelled & heavy,
Ghosts nest in my passage,
Sprawled upon my nodes

This grave is loud.
Dead sex echoes
In the carrier

song ii
my Stowaway, 
our hosts…
I eat and am eaten.

song iii
Unfurl the tongue.
Flare the throat.
My fleshy altar
A seat to offer

You’ll find me,
Sunken,
Hungrier than the ghost
 
– Timothy McCormack

With

Ty Bouque – voice

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Global Breath 1

Ayanna Witter-Johnson: Songs of the Abeng

“Songs of the Abeng” takes us on a journey to uncover stories of triumph and wisdom that have liberated a rich and powerful people. The Abeng, a cow horn, was used to carry coded messages among the Maroon people in Jamaica’s hills, guarding against British Colonial Forces during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This coded language was a warning, a signal and a primary tool of guerrilla warfare that lasted hundreds of years. With its rousing rhythms and mighty melodies, “Songs of the Abeng” delves into this language, uncovering the stories the Abeng holds and its ongoing messages for us today.
– Ayanna Witter-Johnson

Elena Rykova: Vicissitudes

“Vicissitudes” explores the interplay between the trumpet’s acoustic properties and the performer’s physicality. The title reflects the ever-changing nature of the instrument’s sonic landscapes, shaped by the labyrinthine pathways of its valves and tubing. Through this internal maze, the soloist navigates a vast palette of colours, polyphonic textures and delicate sonorities. With precise muscle control and focused intent, the performer transforms the physical complexity of the instrument into an intricate sonic architecture. This piece celebrates not only the craftsmanship of the double bell trumpet, but also Marco Blaauw’s infectious passion for its boundless exploration – a passion that remains one of my greatest sources of musical inspiration.
– Elena Rykova

George Lewis: Buzzing

This piece came out of a very jovial conversation I had with Marco Blaauw about extended techniques for the trumpet. He mentioned that many of the scores he is sent require techniques such as clicking the valves, knocking on the instrument or almost inaudible breath noises. “What about good old ‘buzzing’?” he joked. As a brass player myself‚ I understood immediately. In our very first trombone lesson in school, back in 1960, Ray Anderson and I used a technique that would now be called an extended technique, blowing air through the instrument. Nothing came out – at least nothing anyone would associate with the stentorian character of the trombone, what Hildegard von Bingen called “God’s trombone.” Our teacher, Frank Tirro, came in and saw us and he wasn’t impressed. Then he said: “To play the trombone, you’ve got to start with buzzing.” He demonstrated the technique, first with his lips and then with his lips on the mouthpiece of the trombone. The sound was almost deafening. That was the beginning of a lifetime of buzzing. “Buzzing” is the latest work in my series of “recombinant” works that I began in 2010 with “Les Exercices Spirituels” for octet and live electronics. In these works, acoustic sounds are transformed by interactive digital delays, spatialisation and timbre transformation. At times the trumpet sounds like the old trumpet and ratchet instrument that I saw in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. I imagined the sound of hundreds of these instruments played by musicians moving across a sports ground in Teotihuacan. The word “buzzing” cuts across linguistic boundaries. Marco told me: “The word is onomatopoeic, and it can be understood in Dutch, German and English – and maybe other languages too.” Although I promised Marco that I would mainly use the amazing things that happen when his lips are buzzing, I’ve allowed myself a couple of knocking and Aeolian sounds that are then amplified and transformed using software written by Damon Holzborn of Rustleworks LLC.
– George Lewis

Aaron Holloway-Nahum: I Contemplate Snippets of Silence and Find them Few

I contemplate snippets of silence in mine existence and find them few; but I find that this delights rather than dismays me, for the chaos and hubbub in my life, most of my sea of sound, are my children, who are small quicksilver russet testy touchy tempestuous mammals always underfoot in the understory, yowling and howling and weeping and chirping and teasing and shouting and moaning and laughing and singing and screaming and sneering and sassing and humming and snoring and wheezing and growling and muttering and mumbling and so making magic music all the livelong day.
– Brian Doyle

With

Marco Blaauw – double bell trumpet
Aaron Holloway-Nahum – electronics
Ty Bouque – baritone