Sunday 1 March 2020, 7.30pm
During this evening at Cafe OTO DE PLAYER focusses on the vocals, language and its extensions. The BRAUBLFF (Materie und Laut) serie deals with the following question: “Where and how does language transform into music?” A possible answer: “At the point where language loses its meaning and becomes pure matter through de/re-construction and mutation, which is made possible by (new) technologies, inventive manipulation and/or particular unconventional use of sound and text within artistic contexts”. It will be an unstable and surprising line up with sounds from the nose, breaking necks, vocoder voodoo, gallbladder poetry and the like.
DE PLAYER is a polymorphic production platform in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, which produces interdisciplinary programs and publications on the cutting edge of performance art, experimental music and the visual arts. DE PLAYER emphasises the importance of sound, and the performance and positioning of sound within the visual arts and contemporary experimental music.
DE PLAYER also publishes vinyl releases as a blue print of their stage. So far they produced around 100 items with artists such as Marco Fusinato, Jad Fair, Gerhard Rühm, Dennis Tyfus, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Johannes Kreidler, Tomomi Adachi, etc. Their most recent publications include the works of John Duncan, Karl Holmqvist, BJ Nilsen and MSHR. This year they are working with Valentina Vuksic, Lore Lixenberg, Antye Guenter, Helga Jakobson, GHOST and Ana Guedes amongst many others. DE PLAYER will bring a selection from their catalogue to serve you, and play music from their shop in between the acts.
Gerard Herman is a poet, visual artist and musician who deals with language to give all kind of media and activities meaning. His work cannot be contained in a single medium. In his spontaneous and multifaceted art practice, he does not shy away from broad social issues. However, he usually does this with the necessary dose of poetry, including naive and absurd humor that makes his work quite accessible. Recently he toured around with Schlagersongs, combined bycicle tours with storytelling, reinvented himself as a jazzmusician with African roots and did some very remarkable object based sound performances. The Antwerp-based Entr’acte label produced one of his latest albums ‘Die Paste Die Wrong’.
Maja Jantar is a multilingual and polysonic voice / artist, and director living in Ghent, Belgium, whose work spans the fields of performance, music, poetry and visual arts. A co-founder of the poetic group Krikri (www.krikri.be), she has been giving individual and collaborative performances throughout Europe and experimenting with poetic sound works since 1996. Amongst her collaborators you will find artists from various disciplines, poetry, music, fine arts, theatre. Long time collaborators are poets Angela Rawlings, Vincent Tholomé, Steven J. Fowler, director Ewout D’Hoore, pianist and organiser Guy Vandromme and visual artist Hallveig Ágústsdóttir. Within this program she will bring an interpretation on the work of Lou Andreas-Salome, a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a well-traveled author, narrator, and essayist whose diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished Western thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Paul Rée, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Peter Fengler questions the relationship between sound and performance using different media such as vinyl records, sculpture, installation, performance and multiples. In his performances he seeks to turn bitter absurdity, mundane sounds and poetry into elaborate and precise soundcollages. Besides live actions he is especially interested in the reproduction of sound, the optic and acoustic qualities of vinyl as well as the untapped potential of its materiality. The work invariably reverberates somewhere between intellectual pursuits and nonsense, expresses a fondness for “ultrahobbyism”, and is characterized by subversive undertones. Fengler has co-operated with artists like Felix Kubin, Leif Elggren, Dennis Tyfus, Gerard Herman, Ergo Phizmiz, and has performed at Color Out Of Space Brighton, ZKM Karlsruhe, Sonic Protest Paris, Papiripar Hamburg, Fylkingen Stockholm, Jazzhouse Copenhagen, Les Urbaines Lausanne a.o.
“Peter Fengler is a master in trans-medial art and the brain behind the publisher De Player. His work musicalizes performances, in which grim absurdism, daily sounds and concrete poetry forms a aesthetized collage. He conceives vinyl as sculptures, performances as publications, and unconscious association as a technique for composing.” – The Avant-Guardian
Ute Wassermann is a voice artist, composer performer and improvisor. She grew up in Kiel on the Baltic Sea in an artistic - scientific environment that brought her into contact with environmentally relevant topics.
She studied visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg with artists from Fluxus and Happening like Henning Christiansen and Allan Kaprow, and subsequently visual arts, music and singing at the University of California, San Diego. For many years she has toured the world as an improviser and performer of contemporary music. In the last decade she has been increasingly realising audiovisual voice performances / installations and compositions for soloists and ensembles. At the core of her research is an ongoing and uncompromised exploration of her voice. Ute Wassermann´s singing transcends the human voice resulting in multidimensional sculptural sounds oscillating between electronic, animalistic, inorganic and human qualities. She takes this to the extreme by creating a visceral sound space through the use of different types of microphones.
In her solo album strange songs for voice and birdcalls (TREADER, UK) she embodies a hybrid vocal persona with swirling, trilling, screeching, sighing, breathing and singing tone-colours. Furthermore she extends and alienates the voice including the use of bird whistles, lo-fi electronics, resonators, fieldrecordings and every day objects. With her performances she creates imaginary acoustic habitats in which her chameleon-like voice collaborates with the voices of other-than-humans sounding from raw materials and objects.
She is a member of bands including speak easy (with Phil Minton, Thomas Lehn, Martin Blume), Duo Lanz-Wassermann with turntableist Joke Lanz), electrovoX (with Thomas Lehn and Richard Scott on analogue synths), Asfourieh (with trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj), MUT (Thomas Rohrer, Michael Vorfeld), radio tweets (with trumpeter Birgit Ulher) and performs with musicians and ensembles like Lotte Anker, Jaap Blonk, Marina Cyrino, Isabelle Duthoit, Emilio Gordoa, Aleks Kolkowski, Magda Mayas, Andrea Parkins, Mazen Kerbaj, Liz Kosack, Els Vandeweyer, Charlotte Hug, Fernando Vigueras, Raed Yassin, Michael Zerang, Münchener Kammerorchester, L´ART POUR L´ART, ELISION, ASKO, Distractfold Ensemble, Basel Sinfonietta, Ensemble Mosaik, Quiet Music Ensemble.She has premieres numerous compositions especially written for her voice including works by Richard Barrett, Henning Christiansen, Chaya Czernowin, Hespos, Matthias Kaul, Karen Power, Alejandro Romero Anaya, Sam Salem.
