David Behrman: Long Throw and Freeze Dip
Nicolas Collins: Salvage (Guiyu Blues)
MUSIC II deals with different approaches to the interactive in contemporary music. The series is curated by Jens Brand, media artist, composer, musician and 2008 scholarship holder at the Edith-Ruß-Haus for Media Art. As part of his scholarship, he curated concert evenings of new music under the title MUSIC. MUSIC II kicks off with a concert evening featuring two important artists from the field of electronic music.
The composer, artist and musician David Behrman (*1937), who has worked with John Cage and others since the 1960s and composed pieces for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (including Long Throw, 2007), is regarded as a pioneer of interactive electronic music. His works are programs that create the respective piece in interaction with a musician. Using compositional aspects, he opens up a precisely calculated field for dialog with machines.
Nicolas Collins (*1954) takes the opposite approach: as a pioneer of hardware hacking, sampling and resampling, his approach is rather deconstructivist. Collins knows how to disable a technical device so that music can “happen”. The musician works with machines that produce unpredictable reactions on the verge of collapse, which on the one hand take control away from him, but which he uses to develop the music on the other.
The “MUSIC II” project is part of KLANGPOL.