silent green 4

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Mazen Kerbaj
With a Little Help From My Friends II: From One War to Another

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.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, I recorded myself playing the trumpet on my balcony in Beirut while Israeli airplanes relentlessly bombed the city. From nearly twelve hours of recordings, I posted a six-minute excerpt titled “Starry Night” on my blog, describing it as a duo for trumpet and bombs. In the pre-social media era, the piece was reposted across various blogs, websites and email chains among friends and acquaintances, bringing me widespread support, especially from the international experimental music community.

In one such email, Dutch musician Michel Waisvisz – who ran the STEIM Institute for electronic music research in Amsterdam – invited me to flee Lebanon with my family and stay at STEIM until the war ended. While I chose to remain in Beirut, this email sparked a close and intense friendship between us that lasted for two years, until Waisvisz’s passing in 2008.

Over the course of two years, Michel Waisvisz introduced me to the Crackle Synth, an instrument he invented in the 1970s that holds a unique place in music history. It is one of the earliest self-sufficient, battery-powered electronic instruments with integrated speakers, and one of the few that uses the physicality of the player’s body to generate sound through its pioneering “touch” board, which is controlled and triggered by the fingers. Gradually, I adopted the synth as a second instrument and felt the urge to transform it in the same way I had with the trumpet. Modifying the original, which existed in only twelve copies worldwide, was out of the question, so I decided to build my own modified version based on Waisvisz’s schematics.

Work on the new instrument began in 2018, in collaboration with Sukandar Kartadinata, and was not completed until 2024, amid the Israeli war on Gaza – an event that brought back painful memories of the 2006 Lebanon War. In 2006, I witnessed the war from the perspective of the victim; now, in 2024, I find myself in the difficult position of the remote witness, watching helplessly as a never-ending bloodbath unfolds daily on my screen. The memory of violence experienced firsthand has been replaced by the voyeurism of violence inflicted on others. This shift in one’s role in the face of horror inspired the composition “From One War to Another”, in which I blend acoustic, electro-acoustic and electronic sounds in an attempt to exorcise my past fears, present anger and the visceral anxiety I have been feeling recently about the future.

– Mazen Kerbaj

With

Mazen Kerbaj – trumpet, crackle synth

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Global Breath 3 with Ensemble Musikfabrik

Milica Djordjević: New work for bass clarinet, trumpet and percussion

In 2022/23, I was working on “Nalet”, a large ensemble work to be premiered by Ensemble Musikfabrik, conducted by Ilan Volkov, in January 2023. At the same time, I was working on solo pieces for Carl Rosman, Marco Blaauw and Dirk Rothbrust, which would be premiered a few months later in the Acht Brücken festival. Some of their personal favourite techniques turned out to be particularly effective in combination (Carl’s and Marco’s split tones with Dixi’s scraped tiles; Marco’s pedal notes with Carl’s low flutter-tongued contrabass clarinet, etc.), and it was inevitable that “Nalet”  would feature these three players in extended trio passages. It was equally inevitable that aspects of some of these passages would eventually find a home outside the larger work, combined with other materials in a new trio. 
– Milica Djordjević

Wadada Leo Smith: New work for four bass drums

More information will follow soon.

Marco Blaauw: Enigma

“Enigma” focuses on the distinctive sounds of six conch shells. Drawing on the long tradition of conch shells as signaling instruments and ceremonial objects, the composition examines their natural tonal qualities and possibilities. Extended playing techniques from the trumpet are applied here to produce a wide range of sounds – from deep, resonant tones to soft, airy timbres. The interaction of the six conch shells creates a dynamic soundscape that alternates between harmony and chaos, where the boundaries between individual voices become indistinct. “Enigma” challenges the act of listening. The sounds are like questions waiting to be experienced – questions that resist full resolution. The composition seeks to rekindle the ancient fascination with the instrument’s unique timbre.

Liza Lim: Incandescent Tongue

Eating Fire
Eating fire
is your ambition:
to swallow the flame down
take it into your mouth
and shoot it forth, a shout or an incandescent
tongue, a word
exploding from you in gold, crimson,
unrolling in a brilliant scroll
To be lit up from within
vein by vein
To be the sun
– Margaret Atwood

Liza Lim: Microbiome

The parasite doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop eating or drinking or yelling or burping or making thousands of noises or filling space with its swarming and din.
– Michel Serres, “The Parasite”

We humans are host to and are co-dependent with a multitude of microbes in and on our bodies – bacteria, viruses, fungi and other parasites. The gut microbiome is said to play a crucial role in regulating immunity as well as acting as a kind of “second brain” affecting everything from emotions to sleep-cycles. Both helpful and harmful microbes co-exist in a dynamic flux and we see that what we might think of as an independent “self” is a holobiont (an ecological assemblage) and that “I” is a multi-species, polyphonic multitude.

Oscar Bianchi: Confessioni

Two allied voices, a soprano and a trumpet, appear and tell us about themselves. In searching for their own personal role (Am I a shadow? Am I your alter ego?) the two protagonists create a particular expressive space in which they occasionally refer with a wink of the eye to the emancipation of the dupla in the Renaissance that would go on to lead to spectacular and bold polyphonic developments. Their confession shifts between existential questions and litanies of personal complaints that serve as supposed reflections on their own character. In doing so they reveal themselves as the communicators of brilliant emotional statements and potential new boundaries for powers of expression. As both the ideas and the manner in which they are expressed are often part of a great whole (defined by Oscar Bianchi as “the fluid nature of creativity”) both sound sources find themselves “exposed” (i.e. unaccompanied) again.

With

Ensemble Musikfabrik
Carl Rosman – bass clarinet
Marco Blaauw  – trumpet
Dirk Rothbrust  – percussion

Katrīna Paula Felsberga – soprano
Christine Chapman, Rike Huy, Bob Koertshuis, Nathan Plante, Markus Schwind, Laura Vukobratović – conch shell

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Raven Chacon with The Monochrome Project 2

Raven Chacon: Whistle Quartet

“Whistle Quartet” replicates the way one or ones might learn a song from an elder or leader, how one or ones become part of a group, and how one or ones become leaders when their leader is no longer there.
– Raven Chacon

Raven Chacon: Solo for live electronics

More information will follow soon.

Raven Chacon: Call for the Company, in the Morning

The work references the tradition of fox-hunting horn calls and signals as material for creating an open landscape of drones, with interludes marking the passing of the outdoor day. The composition considers the strive for ecological balance, utilising musical instruments to aid in hunting, though devolving into sport, and corrupting the instrument’s tone into a timbre of fear.

With

The Monochrome Project
Marco Blaauw, Christine Chapman, Mathilde Conley, Rike Huy, Bob Koertshuis, Nathan Plante, Markus Schwind, Laura Vukobratović – trumpet
Raven Chacon – live electronics