J'ai plus de souvenirs que (2014)

22.03.2015 / 19:00
With Zeena Parkins

Premiere at Festival MaerzMusik 2015

Zeena Parkins
J’ai plus de souvenirs que (2014) UA, 60’
I „The room became more velvety, more glowing, darker… i named it Delacroix“
II Improbabke tasks: Schaperstrasse 24
III Dia mimeo topos
IV – [matching tones] shape/body/depth/cover
– Stefan’s words
– I have more memories then
– Color code and redacted score

Concept, composition: Zeena Parkins

Laurent Bruttin: clarinet
Tony Buck: percussion
Magda Mayas: piano/keyboard
Sébastien Roux: electronics (part III)
Christian Kesten: recorded voice
Zeena Parkins: harp
Matthew Ostrowski: sound direction / electronics (part I and II)
tuned copper bowls by Leon Schneiderman

Koproduktion von Berliner Festspiele / MaerzMusik und Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD
Dank an das Walter Benjamin Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin

Zeena Parkins is among performance composers like Elliott Sharp, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Butch Morris and Chris Cutler who easily move between different musical forms of expression, between free improvisation and contemporary composition, Noise music and advanced pop to music for film and dance. The invention of new instruments is as characteristic as the deconstruction and electrification of traditional instruments. For Zeena Parkins, it is the acoustic harp, which she converted to a “sound machine with endless possibilities”.
“J’ai plus de souvenirs que” (“I have more memories than”) is the name of the new work by the composer and performer, who was a guest of the DAAD’s Berlin artists’ programme in 2014, and was designed to fill an entire evening. The starting point is Walter Benjamin’s archival legacy of letters, card indexes, images, scribbles, books, wordplays as well as his autobiographical memoir “Berlin Childhood around 1900” with its imaginative descriptions of sounds. It is the mnemonics technique used in this archive and text that that Zeena Parkins found fascinating about Benjamin, the invisible thread that holds together and makes sense of the apparent hodgepodge. As a composer and improviser, she researches how colours, numeric games, wordplay and visual structures such as lists, colour codes, strokes can be used as a dispositive of a score in Benjamin’s manuscripts in order to initiate musical processes, develop improvisation strategies and generate an animated sound space via a set of loudspeakers in which fragments of sound memories can appear.
“J’ai plus de souvenirs que” consciously works with the stage space at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, which becomes a sonic and multi-layered space of remembrance.

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Tickets: 15€

Tickets and information: www.berlinerfestspiele.de

Photo: Kai Bienert