2010: Burkhard Beins

The last year has been full of interesting contrasts. While I had the chance to go to several places in the world where I’ve never been before during the first half of the year (e.g. Victoriaville with Perlonex & Charlemagne Palestine, Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe with Polwechsel, Seoul and Moscow for playing solo), I’ve spent almost the entire second half just in Berlin performing with Activity Center, Phosphor and Perlonex at the 3 weeks long September festival of Berlin’s Echtzeitmusik-scene or participating in a new large ensemble of Berlin improvisors, the Splitter Orchester, which had it’s first public appearences in Berlin’s main train station in August and at Radialsystem in November.

Those days of performance and/or travel were interspersed with several periods of intense home work and rehearsals, sometimes in pretty remote places. In summer I have spent a few weeks in the Worpswede moorlands again, where I had a sound art residency the year before, in order to work on our book on 15 years of Echtzeitmusik in Berlin which I’m co-editing and also writing for (due to be out in the middle of 2011). And with Polwechsel we had a few periods of work on four new pieces, one by each member, which we have also performed in Japan and later at the Wien Modern Festival in November (the four pieces will be released on Hat Hut in 2011). Those rehearsals not only took place in Berlin and Vienna, but also for instance over 10 days in the Austrian alps.

The year had a good start with The Sealed Knot performing at London’s Café Oto in January. After 10 years of playing all acoustic this was our electro-acoustic premiere. I also had the opportunity to play a few concerts with Trio Sowari again. But performing with those long-running groups was also alternating with some totally new projects. In April bass-player Clayton Thomas and myself played four nights in a row as a duo always opposite a different brass soloist. All eight sets were recorded in order to create a virtual bass/drums plus brass sextet from it, which resulted in two 20’ pieces and will be released as Rhythm Complication & Brass on vinyl in 2011. Another new experience was working with Norwegian flute/electronics player Bjørnar Habbestad for a week in Berlin which will be followed by another performance in Oslo in the following year.

So the variety of my 2010 activites spanned from electro-acoustic solo sets via rehearsals and performances of my interaction-score Adapt/Oppose with two different septets in June and September, working and performing with old and new groups, all the way to participating in large ensembles. Next to the 24-piece Splitter Orchester I was also part of a 21-piece ensemble performing Harding Greens by Sven-Åke Johansson, a meticulously conducted symphony for bowed cardboard boxes, which saw it’s premiere performance on the opening night of Echtzeitmusiktage.

Favourite records of the year:
Neil Young – Le Noise
Davies/Duch/Tilbury – Cornelius Cardew, Works 1960-70
Chris Abrahams – Play Scar