Sorry, this entry is only available in German.
(Deutsch) Marc Kilchenmann: Der Vielseitige
Sorry, this entry is only available in German.
(Deutsch) Andreas Eduardo Frank: Kollaboratives Komponieren und Meta-Komponieren
Sorry, this entry is only available in German.
(Français) Nora Vetter – Les contextes performatifs
Sorry, this entry is only available in French.
Tapiwa Svosve grinds saxophone sounds into the sewage system
Young jazz saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve (*1995) was awarded one of this year’s BAK music prizes. Svosve does not commit himself to any particular style, switching agilely between free jazz, ambient, noise and progressive rock. However, his musical practice is firmly rooted in the jazz tradition.
Jaronas Scheurer
Tapiwa Svosve already achieved a lot, considering his young career: shortly after graduating from Zurich Jazz School, he won the ZKB Jazz Prize with the band District Five, followed by a performance with jazz legends Hamid Drake and William Parker and a year of work for the City of Zurich, where he organised and curated the Zurich Taktlos Festival and co-founded transdisciplinary art collective Gamut. He has performed in productions by the celebrated artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, made music for the Louis Vuitton fashion show, released numerous albums – solo, with his various bands or, for example, the album The Sport of Love in 2023 with American electronic producer Asma Maroof and English cellist Patrick Belaga, whom he met during his collaboration with Wu Tsang. In 2024, this remarkable career was crowned with a tour of Southeast Asia and one of the coveted BAK Music Prizes.
Tapiwa Svosve sounds in G Major Kinda Love from the album The Sport of Love very tender. However, that is just one side of his diverse oeuvre.
Financial scarcity and artistic consistency
Nevertheless, Svosve is just barely getting by financially: “I mainly live off my music. Sometimes it goes alright and sometimes less,” he says during the interview, “Maybe you get to play a lot, but then there’s another dry spell and you limit yourself: you don’t go out anymore, maybe you only eat rice with soy sauce. I can accept that if it then goes up again.” The BAK prize and prize money came at just the right time: “I was really worried about how I was going to make ends meet over the next few months. The prize took me from one reality to a completely different one: One day I had minus twenty francs in my account and the next day I suddenly had this huge prize money.”
The financial scarcity is probably also due to Svosve’s artistic consistency, who hardly, if at all, submits to sales arguments or marketing strategies. “An improvisational approach is fundamental as far as I’m concerned – be it in a jazz trio, in a noise band or when I make ambient music: being open to the potential of collaborations and seeing where this constellation of people takes you.” Svosve sees himself as a jazz musician: “I was musically socialised through jazz, in what other Western musical tradition is this extreme openness at to be found?”
Jazz and community
For Svosve, the openness and improvisational approach of jazz go beyond the actual music making . His work as an organiser and curator has also been influenced by these values: “The fact that I not only make music, but also proactively create spaces for music that the mainstream may not yet be ready for, is an essential part of being a musician for me and looking back at jazz history, this has always been an important part.”
A jazz musician in very different echo chambers
Svosve is essentially a jazz musician. He studied jazz history intensively and also teaches jazz history at the Winterthur Institute for Contemporary Music (WIAM), allthough this is hard to hear in some of his projects.
It characterises his way of being and working rather than the actual musical results. A good example is the album “A Lung in a Horn in a Horn”, released in 2022. In a nocturnal action, he and artist, label operator and sound designer Rafal Skoczek climbed into a large, open pipe that was laid under the Sihl and Limmat rivers. The album was then created there – just him, the saxophone and the psychedelically reverberating Zurich sewerage system, recorded by Skoczek. There was no major clarification of what was possible or legal. There were no rehearsals, no sound check: “The aim of the action was more the way to get there than the actual result. But I still like the record today. It’s so purist. It’s not so much about my playing, but more about how this tunnel actually sounds when I grind saxophone sounds into it.”
Jaronas Scheurer
Tapiwa Svosve and his saxophone, here in A Lung in a Horn in a Horn, recorded in the sewage of Zürich.
Broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musikmagazin, SRF 2 Kultur, 28.9.2024: Preisgekrönt: Der Saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve: Tapiwa Svosve in an interview with Jaronas Scheurer.
Neo profiles:
Tapiwa Svosve, Swiss Music Prizes
LUFF: Music award for Noise from Lausanne
Gabrielle Weber: Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival awarded music prize
LUFF, Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival, has been programming experimental music to accompany a selected film programme in Lausanne since 2002. This year, the festival received one of the special music prizes from the Federal Office of Culture (BAK). A few weeks before the start of this year’s edition, I met three members of the management team at the new Lausanne cultural centre Pyxis, right next to the cathedral in Lausanne’s old town, which is where LUFF’s offices are located. A conversation with Thibault Walter and Dimitri Meier, artistic directors of the music programme, and Marie Klay, managing director.
Gabrielle Weber
Marie Klay, Thibault Walter and Dimitri Meier come to our meeting as a trio and they are constantly developing each other’s ideas in conversation. There’s a reason for this: “The LUFF works as a collective,” Marie Klay tells me right at the start. “The team consists of around 50 people and meets regularly once a week throughout the year.” Decisions are made collectively and everyone has their say. Klay has been part of the team as Managing Director since a reorganisation in 2014: “All areas are equally important. Programming, for example, is no ivory tower”. Joint listening sessions are at the heart of the programme, adds Thibault Walter. They listen to and discuss works together before deciding who will be invited. This allows everyone to get involved. Thibault Walter has been part of the programme since its launch in 2002. Dimitri Meier joined in 2015 and continuously built up the music programming team.
The prize
The LUFF has gradually developed from a small insider event in Vevey to a major festival in Lausanne. Nevertheless, it is still an underground event. “When we received the call from the BAK, we initially thought it was a joke or a phishing phone call: we never expected to receive a music prize,” says Dimitri Meier. “The fact that we’re receiving this award for music is a profound challenge for us. But at the same time it is a recognition of our existential work and our choice of programme over the years,” says Thibault Walter.
Noise!
LUFF likes to label its music programme ‘Noise’. The music genre, which originated in London in the seventies, is commonly understood to mean hiss, full volume, no melody or rhythm. But what is perceived as just ‘noise’ by some people is music to others – white noise can now also be found in the mainstream. But LUFF sees noise differently. “For us, noise is anything that goes against common musical practices. For some years, we also spoke of ‘non-music’ or ‘anti-music’,” says Dimitri Meier.
For Thibault Walter, noise is a relative term: “Noise usually has a negative connotation, but LUFF always uses it positively. We ask ourselves why certain sounds are undesirable and excluded and that’s exactly what we’re interested in.”
At LUFF, noise can also be humorous and melodic or quiet and subtle. Artists from Japan, where noise has been gaining ground since the 1980s and, alongside England, has one of the largest noise communities, are regularly present.
Jon the dog live @LUFF 2023
John the dog
Japanese performer Jon the Dog, for example, already performed at LUFF in 2023 and will be back in Lausanne again this year: she sings songs with a kind of childish voice, accompaning herself on the harmonium: melodious, harmonious, rhythmic and full of humour… in a way that is reminiscent of Japanese animated films. Her name comes from the fact that she performs in a dog costume, sometimes surprisingly in ‘hard’ noise concerts in Japan. For Thibaut Walter, she is an almost mythical figure. He suspects that she wants to hold up a mirror to the scene with this ‘positive immaturity’ and believes it is a reversal that says a lot about the scene.
“Noise doesn’t always mean at full volume, aggressive or exclusive… a sound can also be shaped very finely and full of nuances,” continues Thibault Walter.
Lise Barkas live @ LUFF 2023
Lise Barkas
Another example of the LUFF’s understanding of noise is embodied by Lise Barkas from Strasbourg: Barkas performs solo on the hurdy-gurdy. She was brought to Lausanne by the LUFF at an early stage and is now an internationally renowned noise artist. Her music oscillates between sounds that resemble early music and a scratchy, yet highly differentiated, noisiness. For Dimitri Meier, her concerts can also be read as a criticism of the usual over-amplification in the classical noise scene, which is completely idiotic.
A squat in Vevey
LUFF originated in a squat in Vevey, where a small circle of cinéphiles showed films from the New York Underground Film Festival, says Thibault Walter. The initiator left Switzerland and connected them to the Cinémathèque Suisse in Lausanne. In the Casino de Montbenon, where the Cinémathèque is located, they came across a huge unused room in the basement which turned out to be ideal for concerts. Together, they developed a kind of American New Wave cinema: selected films framed by concerts and so a film festival turned into a film AND music festival. “That’s another paradox. Receiving a music award for a music festival in a film festival.”
Lausanne scene full of experimental formats
The Lausanne scene was already rich in experimental formats before the festival. “The festival allows to showcase things that were already there: in flats, cellars or restaurants. The fact that so many people came together was a powerful, almost magical moment. We realised that we were not alone when we did something in our basements and that encouraged us to keep going,” says Thibault Walter about the early days of the festival.
To this day, all events take place at the Casino de Montbenon, headquarters of the Cinémathèque Suisse. By having them all in one place, the team also wants to bring the different audiences in contact with each other. The collective’s contributors also come from different backgrounds, for example from the film scene, like Marie Klay. The team is open and attentive, there is a friendly, almost familial atmosphere: they all believe and fight for the world being a good place, says Klay. “When you come together, you can make a positive difference”, Thibault Walter adds: “LUFF is a place that gives hope”, and Dimitri Meier: “Whenever one edition is over, we always look forward to the next one!”.
Gabrielle Weber
The LUFF took place for the 23rd time between October 16 and October 20.
New York Underground Film Festival, Pyxis – maison de la culture et de l’exploration numérique, Cinémathèque suisse Lausanne.
broadcasts SRF Kultur
Musik unserer Zeit, SRF Kultur, 25.09.2024: LUFF – Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival taucht auf, author / editor Gabrielle Weber.
Musikmagazin, SRF Kultur, 5.10.24: Noise aus Lausanne: Das LUFF erhält Schweizer Musikspezialpreis, talk (min 10:30): Marie Klay, Dimitri Meier und Thibault Walter in talk with Gabrielle Weber.
Neo-profiles
Lausanne Underground Film&Music Festival (LUFF), Swiss Music Prizes
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri and the independence of objects
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri’s works are fascinating for seeing and hearing. Her pieces, which consists of a variety of objects, sound installations and performances, surprise visitors and listeners with the simplicity and elegance of their functioning. During my meeting with the artist, we discussed the intimate relationship between objects and sound.
Alexandre Babel
By entering the exhibition, a sound composition consisting of a multitude of short pulses fills the room. The sounds are so close together that one perceives a single, constantly moving structure. By approaching the object constituting Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandris Modular n.3, the source of the sound moves closer to the visitors’ ear and he or her begins to distinguish the individual impulses from one another. The closer one gets to it, the more this installation object reveals its identity and sound. It is a continuous rotating movement that generates sound impulses through friction with a nylon thread, amplified by loudspeakers.
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, modular n.3, en collaboration avec Pe Lang, 2019.
The produced music, the third in a series of the same name created in close collaboration with artist Pe Lang, is therefore practically inseparable from its physical appearance. While the collection of loudspeakers creates a sound universe in its own right, understanding the production mechanism unfolds a narrative that reveals a concrete and poetic dimension. “I like to draw the audience’s attention to the way in which an instrument is built. In my opinion, the structure of my works is also based on the understanding of how they work”, explains Papalexandri-Alexandri.
Modular n.3’s principle is also reflected in other works by the artist, such as Untitled n.V or Speaking of Membranes and raises the question of the expectations associated with an object’s function. A loudspeaker is normally used to spread sound by amplifying electric energy. In this case, however, the loudspeakers are not connected, as the sound is acoustic.
“You recognise that it’s a loudspeaker, but I want to give it a privileged space, I want to hear its own voice.” If Papalexandri-Alexandri draws the audience’s attention to the essence of the object by making it vibrate through the movement device, what does it look like when the installation is not switched on or the object is exhibited as inanimate matter? The artist continues: “Sometimes I wonder what happens when a sound or musical object does not produce sound, is it a dead object? I think that every musical object is functional. When you set it in motion, you are exploring a certain kind of functionality. But maybe there are different functionalities to be explored on the same object.”
In Solo for generators, motors and wind resonators, a piece that was composed for recorder player Susanne Fröhlich, with whom Marianthi Papalexandri Alexandri has a long-term relationship, the connection to the instrument bypasses once again conventional expectations. A recorder, dismantled into its individual parts, is presented spread out on a table. On the same table a motorised device sets wires in rotation. These are connected to membranes stretched over the open parts of the recorder. The result is reminiscent of long waves of sound. “As we have dismantled the instrument, you can only see fragments of it”, explains the composer. Once more, the use of a musical object that is normally associated with a specific use, in this case the production of sound by blowing into the mouthpiece, is transformed into a sound manifestation produced by the instrument itself. Papalexandri-Alexandri continues: “When you place this instrument on a stage or as part of an installation, it becomes a resonant object. You see it as a body and no longer as a musical instrument that you recognise. This kind of process gives me the feeling of offering the audience a new approach to the instrument, a kind of tribute.”
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, salon de musique du 31, Susanne Fröhlich, Festival Archipel Genève, march 2019.
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri’s world reveals an attention to manufacturing precision. The immaculate set-up of the equipment suggests that the artist seeks a certain control over the sequence of events. During the performance, however, the programmed control does give the work a rigid quality, on the contrary, it reveals a dimension of fragility emanating from the possible imperfections associated with the passage of time. In relation to the Solo for generators, motors and wind resonators, the composer tells us that control is never absolute. “When I play with this device myself, I can feel it and create beautiful sounds, and the same goes for Susanne (Fröhlich). But I’ve also experienced situations where the device did not work during the performance. This is due to the tension between the performer and the machine, which is necessary for the piece to take shape.”
This duality between control and fragility contributes to the poetic aura of Papalexandri-Alexandri’s works, as she explains: ‘Ultimately, it’s not really about control. My attitude is more about accepting events as they unfold.’ When asked how she would like to develop these events further, she replies: “What’s my personal contribution? I simply want to engage with the existing objects, they already have a lot to tell.”
Alexandre Babel
neo-profiles :
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, Pe Lang, Festival Archipel
The Swiss Museum and Centre for Electronic Music Instruments – a living archive
At only seven years of age the Swiss Museum and Centre of Electronic Musical Instruments (SMEM) already won one of the Swiss Music Awards’ three special prizes. The museum is located in Fribourg and allows to experience technology, history and practice of electronic music-making.
Friedemann Dupelius
‘The award was a total surprise,’ says Victorien Genna, project coordinator at SMEM, ’we wouldn’t have imagined something like this for at least another few years. It’s wonderful to be a recognised Swiss institution.’ Which is not only recognised in Switzerland. In addition to guests from France and Germany, numerous fans from England, the USA, Japan, Australia and New Zealand travel to Fribourg to marvel at its impressive collection. SMEM exhibits some 5000 electronic musical instruments, including almost every conceivable type of device: samplers, drum machines, synthesisers, mixing consoles, effects units, amplifiers, recording devices, microphones – even software such as the first version of the now widely used programme Ableton Live from 2001 and the corresponding old computers on which it used to run.
The shelves rise high to the ceiling of a former brewery – now converted into an area for start-ups and cultural initiatives. But anyone who fears thick layers of dust on the keyboards can be reassured, SMEM sees itself as a ‘living archive’. All of these devices are not only professionally maintained, but can also be played. In the museum’s ‘playroom ’, a wide selection of different instruments is on display, including classics such as the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines. Visitors can book a session for little money and even record their own jams to take home.
A museum for kids and nerds alike
When asked whether SMEM actually makes a distinction between academic, ‘serious’ electronic music and its pop-cultural varieties, Victorien Genna asks what I actually mean by that – and thus gives an indirect, but clear answer. He is not a musicologist or composer, but joined SMEM as a philosophy student who enjoys playing with synths in his private life. ‘FM synthesis is a good example: it made its way from university laboratories to the consumer market and became world-famous with the Yamaha DX7 in the 80s. Here, the nerds get their money’s worth, you can really go into detail. But even five-year-old children or someone who turned 100 should be able to have fun.’
The first circuit ends on a train journey
The fact that SMEM exists at all is a lucky coincidence, as most of the collection comes from Klemens Niklaus Trenkle – an actor who has been collecting electronic instruments since the 1970s. So many, in fact, that at some point his landlord got fed up and told him to get rid of the stuff. On a train journey, he struck up a conversation with architecture professor Christoph Allenspach from Fribourg. Allenspach had had the idea of opening a music-related museum for years and so the first wiring was unexpectedly successful. The instruments soon moved from Basel to Fribourg, an association was founded and a team of volunteers put together. The museum opened in 2017 and not much has changed since then: The number of instruments is large, the budget small.
Victorien Genna of SMEM has produced a documentary series about instruments from the SMEM collection.
In addition to public funding and private donations, SMEM thrives on volunteers and their commitment, such as Victorien Genna, volunteered until he was recently given one of the museum’s three permanent positions. The volunteers repair instruments, mix concerts or take on bar shifts. The newly received prize is therefore worth more than gold, as the museum’s collection is constantly growing. But how are you supposed to filter out which delay module or wavetable synth will be historically relevant from a flood of new technical releases? ‘Sometimes you can quickly recognise technical revolutions,’ says Victorien Genna, referring to the Elektron Digitakt, released in 2017, ’it was instantly clear upon release, that it would become an important sampler for the 21st century. But often one can only speculate and gets to know after a few years.’ Klemens Niklaus Trenkle still buys new instruments for the museum himself. ‘He has a pretty good feel for what is or will be relevant.’
SMEM organises concerts, workshops and lectures – at least once a month. Several times a year, artists in residence are hosted in Fribourg for one to four weeks to experiment with instruments of their choice. There is no obligation to produce results, but something always comes out of it, which is then usually released on Fribourg’s label oos. In October, the label plans a release by Viennese musician Oliver Thomas Johnson, alias Dorian Concept, who worked with the Yamaha CS01 synthesiser at SMEM. The polyrhythmic meshes of percussive synthesisers begin to groove more and more with each new layer and the 200 beats per minute speed is not noticeable in this agile music. It is a living archive in which history is not only documented, but also actively shaped.
Friedemann Dupelius
Swiss Museum and Centre for Electronic Music Instruments (SMEM)
SMEM on Instagram
The online magazine of SMEM
Dorian Concept on Bandcamp
Klemens Niklaus Trenkle
The album Unconditional Contours by Legowelt, partly composed at SMEM
Meta-layers and broken fascination in Léo Collin’s music theatre
He mixes sound, performance, video and theatre with cooking, sport, thrillers and environmental activism. Young composer Léo Collin born in France and now living in Zurich, produces evocative music theatre happenings. I visited him in his studio, located in Zurich’s Rote Fabrik.
Gabrielle Weber
Most of his small studio is taken up by a simple wooden table, covered with a control desk, microphones, headphones, cables nd with an electric guitar leaning against it. Large, colourful sketches hang on the walls. This is where Léo Collin develops his music theatre pieces, which are always site-specific, i.e. performed in the great outdoors, industrial spaces or petrol stations.
Léo Collin, Video: Fastnacht, Neue Musik Rümlingen 2020.
Dressed in camouflage suits, performers storm down a grassy hill from a wooded area. They chase each other and perform almost choreographed actions. Fastnacht, a music theatre piece with electroacoustics, premiered on the green meadow at the Rümlingen 2020 festival, focuses on a community celebrating war games. The piece is characteristic of both his musical concept and workflow. Collins’ interdisciplinary site-specific music theatres combine sound with video, electronics as well as theatrical actions and the audience usually right in the thick of it.
“There was little time for the Fastnacht on site-rehearsals and the play was also performed several times, which required precise conceptual preparation and clear instructions for the performers”. The score for Fastnacht is an audio track that uses ‘in ear-headphones’ in order to assign individual actions to each performer. Roles that break the plot are built into the performance and the performers are followed by a sound crew with a microphone (Collin himself) and control desk. “By showing how a scene is recorded, I break the fascination. I like such meta-layers”, says Collin. For the live performance, each audience member receives headphones with live sound and a fictitious audio contribution: this soundtrack creates another meta-layer. ‘Many people play war games like this at home on the weekend. They don’t want to have to experience war themselves. I want to show these dualities’.
Fractured re-enactments
Collin creates fractured re-enactments which always come with a personal background: “The idea came from a photograph seen at Zurich’s Photobastei – a nondescript landscape with apple trees entitled ‘Verdun 2017′. My family is from that area. One of the bloodiest battles of the First World War took place in this idyllic landscape in 1916. But the photo shows a harmless subject”. A place always carries history, says Collin. “Through sound, I can add a completely unexpected layer to a picturesque landscape.”
Léo Collin grew up in a small village in the French Jura, studied in Lyon, Geneva and finally at the ZHdK in Zurich, initially musicology, then piano, electroacoustics and composition. He composes electronic music for theatre and dance, including for Schauspielhaus Zurich or Deutsches Theater Berlin and conceives music theatre and educational projects, for example for the Sonic Matter Festival Zurich.
Collins’ work is always oriented towards specific spaces and mostly developed with a fixed group of musicians, the Kollektiv International TOTEM (KIT). He usually also performs himself, involving other musicians and artists. The audience is part of his pieces, it participates musically or is right in the midst of it, surrounded by loudspeakers or equipped with headphones.
Meaningful places
Locations are also essential in his trilogy, a three-part scenic work entitled Baleen, Medusa and Corals. Corals, the third part, is set in a petrol station, for example. It is the human counterpart of coral reefs, microcosms like cities that appear out of nowhere and grow continuously. “In the vast plains of the USA or Australia, there is often nothing for a long stretch and then suddenly a petrol station full of people, food and petrol, while petrol embodies environmental destruction.”
Léo Collin, Corals, music for Gas stations, Ensemble Inverspace, in house-production SRG SSR.
Trilogie’s general theme is the concern for biodiversity loss. The three titles Baleen, Medusae, Corals – whales, medusae, corals – stand for different sea creatures and their biospheres. “It’s about the food chain in ‘web food’: the big ones eat the small ones,’ says Collin. “In my youth, ‘No future’, i.e. criticism of capitalism and consumerism, hovered over everything. Today, the topic is still with me.”
Medusen took place in a trashy industrial building on the outskirts of Zurich. The audience is divided in four groups, wearing headphones and guided by devices on their mobile phones or by an actor, walking through various rooms in the footsteps of a past crime.
A jigsaw puzzle of events
The plot consists of a jigsaw puzzle of events: in the first part, Balleen, between self-awareness group, sports event or TV cooking show, in the second part, Medusen, between crime thriller, concert and reality show: “I was involved in very different things before I started with music. In Trilogie, I explore my childhood and youthful memories and translate them into sound,” says Collin. “As a child, for example, I often sat in front of the television and usually watched sports. I later realised that the commentary is what gave it that kind of magic. My work confronts these memories with contemporary music in the hope of some kind of emancipation.”
Léo Collin, Trilogie: Balleen, Corals, Medusen
Trilogy has accompanied Collin’s musical path for many years. The piece is constantly growing, proliferating and changing – like the biospheres within the worldwide web food.
Gabrielle Weber
An extension of Fastnacht, the music theatre Blind Test, will be performed at the Neue Musik Rümlingen Festival together with Kollektiv International Totem and Hyper Duo on August 24 and 25, 2024.
On 19 June 2025, Léo Collin and the Collegium Novum Zurich will once again devote themselves to biodiversity in Plankton, a music theatre for performers, ensemble and mobile audience (2025, world premiere at Zentralwäscherei Zurich).
neo-profiles
Léo Collin, Kollektiv International Totem (KIT), Neue Musik Rümlingen, Hyper Duo, Sonic Matter Festival, Collegium Novum Zürich
Lauren Newton’s vocal artistry
A pioneer of vocal artistry – US-American vocalist Lauren Newton.
Her passion for exploring the full potential of the voice drives her work in free improvisation, jazz and contemporary music. Closely associated with the Swiss experimental music scene, she taught jazz vocal performance and free improvisation at the Lucerne University of Music (HSLU) between 1993 and 2019.
Luca Koch
While her career encompasses a broad range of ensembles, from large jazz orchestras to vocal ensembles and long-standing duos, her concerts are notable for their captivating depth and immediacy. This year Lauren Newton is celebrating her 50th anniversary on stage. For the SRF Culture programme Living Past, I visited her in Tübingen, Germany, where she is currently based and had the chance to listen to groundbreaking live recordings with her.
A twist of fate
Lauren Newton actually wanted to study art in Oregon in the USA, but she didn’t get in and, as a twist of fate, she tried her luck in the music department. Both classical music and jazz were already present at home. Her father played double bass and sang in nightclubs. Lauren also had a good voice and began studying classical singing. In her third bachelor year, she was allowed to take part in an exchange year in Stuttgart. This was unusual for Bachelor students, but her teacher vouched for her and Germany became her new home.
Lauren Newton, Sound Songs, Solo–Improviation 2006.
Classical music student by day, jazz-rock singer by night
In Stuttgart, Lauren began her Masters in the singing class of opera singer Sylvia Geszty and at the same time immersed herself in the city’s young jazz scene. At a jam session, she met trumpeter Frederic Rabold, who was impressed by her voice. A short time later, Newton was singing in his jazz-rock band, the Frederic Rabold Crew. The mix of simply composed themes and free improvisation was ideal for her and allowed her to refine and use previously acquired skills in the more liberated setting of improvisation. Both activities merged seamlessly, it never felt like a double life, she told me in the interview.
Vienna Art Orchestra
The Frederic Rabold Crew was invited to Vienna in 1979 for the television programme Bourbon Street, which did not go unnoticed by Swiss jazz musician Mathias Rüegg, who had founded the Vienna Art Orchestra with Wolfgang Puschnig two years earlier. After the TV appearance, he immediately asked Lauren Newton if she wanted to join. For ten years, Lauren Newton was an irreplaceable part of the Vienna Art Orchestra, which became an authority in experimental jazz with dozens of album productions and major tours. Her voice stands out from the jazz orchestra with razor-sharp precision and playful virtuosity. A time that Lauren Newton would not have missed for the world, even if the constant travelling on the tour bus as the only woman was challenging.
Vocal Summit
I got to know Lauren Newton personally when she was teaching at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. To me, she was not only an important figure as a vocalist with a wide vocal range, but also as a musician with a great interest in other voices. She not only helped her students to discover their own voices, but also collaborated with other singers on stage time and again. Together with Bobby McFerrin, Urszula Dudziak, Jeanne Lee and Jay Clayton, she formed the vocal all-star band: the Vocal Summit. Together, five completely different voices create soundscapes that breathe. Lauren Newton also continued her work with voices in larger formations with vocal ensemble Timbre.
Vom Vom Zum Zum
Lauren Newton has made a name for herself as an experimental vocalist who expresses herself particularly through sounds. But working with text also plays an important role in her music, which is plain to see and hear in her particularly influential collaboration with Austrian poet Ernst Jandl. His poems were deconstructed and reassembled, words were twisted, stretched and spoken backwards. The album Vom Vom Zum Zum, on which Ernst Jandl speaks while Lauren Newton plays around his words, was a special discovery for me.
Pi from Vom Vom Zum Zum, Lauren Newton with Wolfgang Puschnig, Mathias Rüegg, and Uli Scherer, 1988.
Duos in dialogue
Free improvisation is like a musical conversation. The players respond to each other, they comment, agree or argue. This works best in a duo, Lauren Newton tells me in the SWR studio in Tübingen and duo recordings form a large part of her oeuvre, featuring collaborations with Anthony Braxton, Phil Minton, Aki Takase and Joëlle Léandre, for example.
O How We, Lauren Newton and Phil Minton performed together on stage for the first time at the A Voix Haute Festival in Bagnères de Bigorre, France, on August 13, 2010.
The double bassist Joëlle Léandre in particular has accompanied her to this day. Their deep musical friendship is reflected in their interplay. The rich, concise sound of Léandre’s double bass playing perfectly complements Newton’s crystal-clear voice. The duo recently released a new album: Great Star Theatre, San Francisco.
Luca Koch
Frederic Rabold, Frederic Rabold Crew, Mathias Rüegg, Bobby McFerrin, Urszula Dudziak, Jeanne Lee, Jay Clayton, Wolfgang Puschnig, Vienna Art Orchestra, Ernst Jandl, Anthony Braxton, Phil Minton, Aki Takase, Joëlle Léandre.
neoprofile:
Lauren Newton
broadcast SRF Kultur:
Living Past – Lauren Newton, Pionierin der Stimmkunst, 13.02.2024, made by Luca Koch.