Phill Niblock in memoriam

Wednesday, 15 January, 2025, 8pm

In January 2024, the US composer and intermedia artist Phill Niblock passed away at the age of 90. Niblock was a frequent guest at klubkatarakt, most recently in 2019, and was closely connected to the festival.
Known for his thick, loud drones of music, Niblock’s signature sound is filled with microtones of instrumental timbres that generate many other tones in the performance space.

For the opening, klubkatarakt is honouring this special artist with a large-scale, immersive concert in which his music and films will be presented in all three halls. In addition to the Dedalus Ensemble, long-time companions such as electronic musician Thomas Ankersmit (Berlin), violist Elisabeth Smalt and singer Alfrun Schmidt from Scordatura Ensemble (Amsterdam), pianist Ju-Ping Song (New York), flautist Erik Drescher (Berlin), Ensemble Nelly Boyd (Hamburg) and others will be performing.

Dedalus
Ensemble in Residence 2025

Didier Aschour guitar, artistic direction
Amélie Berson flute
Pierre-Stéphane Meugé saxophone
Christian Pruvost trumpet
Thierry Madiot trombone
Silvia Tarozzi violin
Cyprien Busolini viola
Deborah Walker cello
Éric Chalan double bass

15 to 17 January, 2025, various times

Special guest as ensemble in residence at this year’s festival is Dedalus from Toulouse/France. Founded in 1996 by Didier Aschour, Dedalus is organized as a collective in which arrangements, orchestrations, and interpretations are developed collaboratively.
 Their repertoire ranges from classics of minimalism to commissions from composers, and also includes recreations of works by unclassifiable artists.


Defying traditional categories, the ensemble performs conceptual and sensitive music that is radical and captivating, subtle and powerful.
 Dedalus will play a total of four concerts and will also perform in the opening concert.

Duo Scordatura – Elisabeth Smalt & Alfrun Schmid

Wednesday, 15 January, 2025, 8pm

The Amsterdam based Scordatura Ensemble grew initially from a trio project with musicologist and keyboard player Bob Gilmore (1961- 2015) to perform the works for intoning voice, Adapted Viola and Chromelodeon by the American maverick composer Harry Partch, for which the ensemble commissioned an exact copy of Partch’s Adapted Viola. Their concerts feature ‘classics’ from the worlds of microtonal and spectral music, together with new commissions, focussing on alternative tuning systems.

The original Trio Scordatura has played several performances with the American composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock, in collaboration with contemporary ensembles such as the Crash Ensemble from Ireland, the Klang ensemble from Holland and Nelly Boyd from Germany.

Nelly Boyd

Wednesday, 15 January, 2025, 8pm

The composers’ collective Nelly Boyd emerged 2004 from the need to break up formal academic structures, to explore different influences from classical composition, electro-acoustic music, rock, improvisation etc. and to search for its own sound – all of this in a non-hierarchical framework.

Since 2006, Nelly Boyd has worked closely with Phill Niblock for almost two decades, performing numerous concerts, premieres and first performances by, for and with the composer. This collaboration is also documented in various CD and DVD recordings.

Matthias Meyer

Wednesday, 15 January, 2025, 10pm

Matthias Meyer (Hamburg) is a visual artist and filmmaker and is interested in music. He has been buying records for forty years and sometimes he even plays them.

Dedalus
Ensemble in Residence 2025

Didier Aschour guitar, artistic direction
Amélie Berson flute
Pierre-Stéphane Meugé saxophone
Christian Pruvost trumpet
Thierry Madiot trombone
Silvia Tarozzi violin
Cyprien Busolini viola
Deborah Walker cello
Éric Chalan double bass

Benjamin Maumus sound

Thursday, 16 January, 2025, 7:30pm and 10pm

On the second day, Dedalus will first present the German premiere of Histoire sentimentale des intervalles by the Italian composer Alessandro Bosetti (* 1973). The piece creates harmonic universes from ‘found’ sound
material through free or synaesthetic associations by the musicians.
Bosetti has a particular interest in the musicality of language and in the voice, conceived as an autonomous object and an instrument of expression. His works enacts a dialogue between language, voice and sound within complex tonal and formal constructions.

In the night concert, Ensemble Dedalus will perform a programme of works by the English musician, producer, visual
artist and theorist Brian Eno (* 1948). He has been described as one of popular music’s most influential and innovative
figures. In the mid-1970s, he laid the foundations for a new musical genre between avant-garde and pop, Ambient Music.
Dedalus will present instrumental arrangements of Discreet Music and other Ambient pieces by the British experimentalist.

Alessandro Bosetti: Histoire sentimentale des intervalles (2024)

Thursday, 16 January, 2025, 7:30pm

Questioning seven musicians from the Dedalus ensemble about their relationship with intervals, Alessandro Bosetti asks each of them to sing four notes. On the ensuing harmonic chart, he composes a “Sentimental History of Intervals” for seven instruments, which explores a geography of musical pitches through microtonal writing and meticulous tuning work.

The piece is built around the relationships between subjectivity, memory and harmony through free or synaesthetic associations. It traces the emotional stratifications, memories and idiosyncrasies that constitute the collective ear and musical sensitivity of a musical ensemble.

Thomas Ankersmit: Solo Serge Modular Performance

Thursday, 16 January, 2025, 9pm

Thomas Ankersmit plays the Serge Modular analog synthesizer, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.

Inspired equally by musique concrète and more recent electroacoustic improvisation, he aims to create a grittier and more fractured soundworld than commonly heard on modular synthesizers.

Ankersmit uses entirely “pure” Serge Modular signals, with no other sound sources or effects, trying to create an almost tactile, “graspable” sound. A music that is tuned – quite literally – to the resonances of the performance space.

Long Night

Saturday, 18 January, 2025, 8pm – …

The Long Night did not grow out of the festival alone, but from a concert form developed by the composers‘ collective katarakt back in the 1990s. The concept is simple, but holds new surprises every year, as the festival primarily presents first and world premieres by the local and audiovisual performances.

Gregory Büttner: Surfing Surfaces (2023)

Composition for two rotating fans, objects and prerecorded sounds

Saturday, 18 January, 2025

Various plastic packaging (yoghurt pots, boxes of chocolates) are held with one corner on the rotating flat center surface of the fans so that complex grinding noises or rubbing sounds are produced. These sounds are additionally modulated with acoustic resonators (paper cups, tin cans). Sometimes there is a playback of various sine tones and pre-recorded, partially processed rubbing sounds.

Pascale Criton

Friday, 17 January, 2025, 6pm and 7:30pm

Since the 1980s the French composer Pascale Criton has been researching sound variability, microtones, multisensory reception and the spatialization of listening. In her compositions, Criton combines microtonal and diatonically tuned instruments with electronics. Her compositional approach consists of going beyond the natural discontinuity of diatonic scales by working with very dense microtonal scales. The state of continuity she strives for is related to these scales consisting of very fine micro-intervals. The interval of two or three sixteenth tones is very small and is hardly perceived by the ear, but it influences the perception of timbre, rhythm and sense of time.

Following a presentation in collaboration with the Verband für aktuelle Musik Hamburg, Pascale Criton will present a selection of her compositions for the first time in Hamburg together with Dedalus. klubkatarakt has commissioned a new piece from her, which will be premiered at the concert.

Dedalus
Ensemble in Residence 2025

Friday, 17 January, 2025, 7:30pm and 10pm

Dedalus opens the third day of the festival with a portrait of Pascale Criton. Born in 1954, the French composer has been researching sound variability, microtones, multisensory reception and the spatialization of listening.

In the night concert, Dedalus will play Occam Hepta I by Éliane Radigue, which was written for the ensemble. Radigue (* 1932), one of the most important pioneers of electronic music, writes long, gradual sound progressions with a feel for finest nuances in her instrumental music.

The second piece played by the ensemble is Overlays – AtmospheresTransparent/Opaque by the American composer
Catherine Lamb (* 1982). This work was also written especially for the ensemble. Lamb belongs to a younger generation of composers who deal with the interaction of sounds, acoustic phenomena, just intonation, etc.

Ju-Ping Song

Friday, 17 and Saturday 18 January, 2025

Surprisingly, we can present a solo piano performance by the US-American pianist Ju-Ping Song on this evening. Song is internationally recognized as one of today’s masters of contemporary music. Among others she will play Techno Etudes by Karen Tanaka in this program.

Catherine Lamb: Overlays – Atmospheres Transparent/Opaque (2013)

Friday, 17 January, 2025, 10pm

Catherine Lamb is interested in the physical interactions between sounds that musicians arrange in harmonic space, in search of a form of “sacred realism”. She is one of the most celebrated and sought-after composers of her generation. Her works have been commissioned by leading new music ensembles such as the JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Dedalus and Ensemble Musikfabrik.

Molly Joyce: Rave (2015) & Electricity (2020)

Samstag, 18.1.2025

Molly Joyce was born in 1992 in Pittsburgh. She started her instrumental music education on the violin. After a car accident permanently damaged her left hand at the age of 7, she began playing the cello by using her left hand for the bow and right hand on the fingerboard. She also learned to play the trumpet and began composing on the computer.

Joyce has studied with Samuel Adler, Martin Bresnick, Guus Janssen, David Lang, Han Lash, Missy Mazzoli, Martijn Padding, Christopher Rouse, and Christopher Theofanidis.

Rave will be played by pianist Ju-Ping Song. The composition is part of Song’s first solo album Monad, which was released in December 2024. Electricity is performed by guitarist Chad Kinsey.

Raspe

Sunday, 1, January 2025, 1:00am

Raspe is a Hamburg-based DJ who‘ll present an eclectic selection of records creating a wonky, stoical and obscure sound from different spheres.

Svetlana Maraš

Saturday, 18 January, 2025

Special guest of the Long Night 2025 will be the Serbian electronic musician and composer Svetlana Maraš. Maraš works at the intersection of experimental music, sound art and new media. She describes her music as “complex and dense musical structures and forms without exact repetitions.”. Rather a continuously changing sound over the course of time.

Pit Przygodda: An audiovisual Essay on the Moon

Pit Przygodda Silhouette Synthesizer

Saturday, 18 January, 2025

Inspired by the technology of light-sound, which was recorded on old cinema films as a wave track next to the picture windows, artist musician Pit Przygodda has been looking for a visual introduction to the audio wave itself since the early 1990s: He wanted to create audio wave forms by moving his hand-silhouette, which then become sound at the same moment.

Through various experimental films, the search led to the self-invented Silhouette Synthesizer, which he has been building and selling since 2021. The instrument brings with it an as yet unknown multimedia-narrative language that is still completely new in its expression and dramaturgy.

Jiwon Sim: Blomstgrit [OE blōstm + grit] (2024)

for one percussionist & live electronics with sensor 

Saturday, 18 January, 2025

flowers on the small, loose particles of stone or sand.
The pitch of the sound that came into the microphone was adjusted using a sensor. The possibility of sound of percussion instruments was explored, and it is a concern about sound expansion.

Kris Kuldkepp: Music for Tropical Storms (2024)

for modular synthesizer and objects

Kris Kuldkepp (EE) is a sound and performance artist based in Hamburg, Germany. Her work explores the perception, materiality, and behavior of sound and its resonance in physical and/or mental spaces. Additionally, her work embodies the philosophy of and strives towards non-authoritarian musical forms and spaces that balance between meaning and noise.

Philipp Krebs: Abfertigung, Etüden für E-Gitarre und Elektronik (2019/2021)

Saturday, 18 January, 2025

Composer Philipp Krebs (* 1994) engages himself with current trends dealing with the design of sound in the media of the pop cultural mainstream and examines how different art forms operating with sound influence each other across genres.

Gisbert Watty plays guitar: classical and electric. He is especially engaged in chamber music and contemporary music. Concert tours have taken him all over Europe and Australia with his permanent ensembles. Collaborations with and premieres of composers from all over the world.

Okapi

Sascha Demand electric guitar
John Eckhardt double bass
Tobi Gronau sound table
René Huthwelker synthesize

Saturday, 18 January, 2025

Four sound researchers – each equally a composer and instrumentalist – understand their own music as “okapi”: textures, figures, structures, forms. The quartet’s body of sound is already an organism of sound and color.
And so the band’s productions are originally created in a kind of pure contemplation of the sound apparatus itself.

““The beauty of Okapi is the highly improbable soundscapes that automatically emerge every time we play together.”
Meister Eckhardt

Die Dicke Trompete

Hamburg’s free improvising Lad*ies Orchestra

Saturday, 18 January, 2025

Since 2019, Krischa Weber and Georgia Hoppe have each invited three female colleagues to the small stage of the Hafenbahnhof as part of the blurred edges festival. After five charming, witty, diversely orchestrated concerts, the time was ripe to bring together all the musicians involved so far in a great sound spectacle.
After a brilliant “Grande Soirée” in the Christianskirche Ottensen in September 2024, Hamburg’s freely improvising Lad*ies Orchestra presents itself for the second time at the end of klubkatarakt 2025.