2010: Ignaz Schick

Zangi Music in the Year of the the Metal Tiger

Since the start of my career this year was one of the most intense and maybe extreme in musical terms, lots of amazing projects, both as an organizer and artist, suprising meetings and performances with old and new heroes, meeting old and new friends, and playing old and new music.

The wonderful year of music & the excitement started out with two amazing rehearsal blocks during my annual January sabbatical with two musically very different projects: one was with legendary percussionist and sound conceptualist Sven-Ake Johansson (and our very abstract & deliberate studies about manual and motor driven rotation of objects, skins, brushes, card boards) and the other with most amazing Italian singer/song writer Margareth Kammerer followed in early February by a very deep and emotional recording session in duo with Charlemagne Palestine who came to Berlin to perform at the French Dome.

My real concert season started in February with a 10-gig harsh noise tour through mostly Eastern Europe (Prague, Brno, Budapest, Ljubljana, Firenze, Milano, Geneva, Lyon) with the double package of Pokemachine (Anders Hana, Mat Pogo) and Tree People (John Hegre, Morten J.Olsen, Ignaz Schick). Mainly underground venues, totally low budget like in the old days and being locked into a van, with several night drives and bad weather but many nights of highly energetic music.

After the tour I returned to Firenze to perform with almighty vocalist Mat Pogo at Villa Romanna - with me being completely stressed out performing with a last minute collection of objects due to the fact that my luggage got stuck in Berlin. The concert was followed by a three or four day recording session with Pogo at the Burp Enterprise studios in Nipolzzano in the Toscany mountains.

The long list of surprising 2010 projects and collaborations took off with a magic duo night at Berlin legendary venue "ausland" with Dawid Szczesny, Sven-Ake Johansson and Mat Pogo, a really nice record release concert at Goethe Institute Montreal with Martin Tetreault and a wonderful block of 4 days with 8 duo sets at Montreal venue Perte de Signal set up and curated by Tetreault: first meetings with protagonists of the wonderful Montreal scene like Nadia Francavilla (viola), Anne-Francoise Jaques (selfmade devices), Alex St.Onge (laptop, voice), Michel F. Coté (drums), Erin Sexton (electronics), Gordon Allen (trumpet), Philippe Lauzier (bass clarinet), David Lafrance (turntables).

From there I took a plane to NYC and went into a two weeks private residency in a wonderful visual artist studio in Brooklyn with appearances at Experimental Intermedia (solo and in duo with Margareth Kammerer), and a minimarathon which I curated at Issue Project Room performing 5 short duo sets with Nate Wooley, Maria Chavez, Aaron Moore, Aki Onda & Chris Forsyth. Plus rehearsals and meetings with David Watson, Sebastian Lexner, Gill Arno, Andrew Lafkas ... followed by a one week residency at legendary Chicago loft/venue The Enemy. Here concert appearanes solo and in trio with Brent Gutzeit and Michael Hartman plus various recording sessions and a lecture at SAIC.

Most outstanding & surprising was the a recording session with AACM-master musician Mwata Bowden on clarinet and baritone sax who I first met in Europe when he was touring with Ed Wilkerson way back in the mid 80ies. Apart from that meetings/recordings with Eric Leonarson, Jason Soliday, Aaron Zarzutzki, Brent Gutzeit, Michael Hartman, Todd Carter ...

After the intense week in Chicago I took a bus down to Columbus/Ohio and started touring for 10 days with Louisville based guitar hero R Keenan Lawler who I first met on our 2001 Perlonex US tour. The music took off from the first note settling in a weird zone of odd tunings, bowings and quite strange melodies and we had a great time together, playing shows in Pittsburgh (opening up for Mali guitar star Vieux Farka Toure), Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Charlottesville, Richmond, Athens, Atlanta. After a few days off in Louisville I took a plane to San Diego where I stayed for a week with my dear friend, fantastic piano player/composer & anarchist Phil Skaller. He set up the "Unsafe Space" event for me in a defunkt faculty building of UCSD, a reminiscene to my Berlin 12 hours concert "Erase & Reset". Every full hour I was performing with another student or professor of the faculty, most sets where about 15-20 minutes in length followed by open jam sessions. The quality of the players was very high but their endurance throughout the night rather disappointing. By 3 o'clock in the morning only Phil and two surf rock twin brothers were still there and capable of performing, all he others had passed out due to tiredness or too big consumption of alcohol. During the rest of my one week stay I gave two lectures for the students of the music faculty about turtablism and noise music and two more concerts with various students and teachers from the faculty (amongst others with Phil Skaller, Jeff Kaiser, etc. etc.)

During my short two weeks return to Berlin I participated for the first time in the monthly public rehearsal of Splitter Orchestra at Wabe (and was quite much surprised about the extremely high quality of the interplay with so many diverse musicians & characters), performed a spontaneous trio with Kim Myhr and Nils Ostendorf at Miss Hecker and a legendary night with a new acoustic trio (with Clayton Thomas on bass, Paul Lovens on drums and myself on alto saxophone) in Zoglau/Lower Bavaria and just got back on a plane with Perlonex to catch up with Charlemagne Palestine to perform Perlonex & Charlemagne Palestine at the famous Festival International de Musique Actuelle Victoriaville followed by another 10 days stay in Montreal.

In early June I perfomed a solo set with my new fast spinning motor (the pocket turntable) at Sowieso sharing the bill with a duo of Clayton Thomas & Morten Olsen, took part in my second Splitter rehearsal and performed with sound artist Eric Leonardson from Chicago in a new small Neukölln venue called "Altes Finanzamt".

Apart from this the organisation work for the Echtzeitmusiktage started to become really intense. On July 1 I learned that the contract of my new studio was cancelled due to S-Bahn renovations on Ostkreuz and that I would have to move my stuff during Echtzeitmusiktage in the end of September ... Due to the festival organisation I reduced my concert activity. Some of the apearances to follow were with Dawid Szczesny in Kirschau, with Maria Chavez at NK, with the Splitter Orchestra and a trio with Michael Vorfeld, Bertrant Gauget and myself at Hauptbahnhof for their "Ohrenstrand Mobil" Festival. Besides all this in August reherasal phases with Perlonex & Phosphor preparing the groups to be ready for the Echtzeitmusiktage.

September became the most intense month I ever experienced in my life, starting with the recording of the music for a one hour radio play at RBB with director Götz Naleppa in only 3.5 studio days and then performing with several bands (Perlonex, Schick/Thomas/Lovens, Phosphor & Tree People) at the 3 weeks long Echtzeitmusiktage which I also took complete responsibility for as producer and curator.

On Ocotober 1 I took a plane to Lisbon to go into a two weeks residency in the mountains Northeast of Porto. The contrast of course could not be bigger: to find myself after months of organizational crazyness suddenly in the complete calmness of the Portuguese mountains with only the host & one other sound artist (Marc Behrens) in that residency in a tiny remote village. A very calm and nice work phase and project development (an analog field recording project collecting natural objects which are replacing my normal objects for a composition which will be presented at the Paivascapes festival in March 2011).

After very calm and concentrated two weeks in Nodar I started travelling and performing a few solo concerts in cities like Coimbra, Porto & Lisbon. Directly from Portugal I travelled to Italy to work in the studio in Nipolzano with Mat Pogo starting to mix and edit our recordings from February. After I went to Munich to perform a solo concert at the Academy of Fine Arts plus giving a lecture for students there. In November I perfomed a fantastic and intense duo concert in Berlin with fellow turntablist Joke Lanz, rehearsed with Marjolaine Charbin before going into the intense 8 days rehearsal process and concert with the 24 piece Splitter Orchestra.

Besides this also concerts with Seiji Morimoto and rehearsals with Liz Allbee and Marcello Silvio Busato. In early December I performed with another old and all time hero: Tristan Honsinger at Sowieso (in a trio with him, me and guitarist Mikaelle Pellegrino) and a day later in duo with Mat Pogo at Raum 20. The next morning I took a train to Vienna for setting-up my sound installation "Oh Mali, I miss you" at Museumsquartier (beside artists like Gordon Monohan, Douglas Henderson, Janet Cardiff, Robin Minard, Rolf Julius, ...) and performing the final concert of the year with the Montpellier Collective Rude Awakening at ausland (a duo with young turntablist Jonathan Fenez and in a composition by/with Bernhard Günter).

Besides the not easy task of trying to keep my regular working bands and projects together and setting up the Echtzeitmusiktage 2010 the year was very strongly characterized by performing in spontaneous combinations with either very young and yet not so known artists or by first meetings with all time heroes like Sven-Ake Johansson, Mwata Bowden, Paul Lovens, Tristan Honsinger, Bernhard Günter, ... Apart from this it became obvious that one of my most favorite improvisation settings is the duo meeting, no matter if in working groups (like with Andrea Belfi, Dawid Szczesny, Martin Tetreault, Mat Pogo, Keenan Lawler, etc. etc.) or in new constellations and first meetings (with Sven-Ake Johansson, Mwata Bowden, Eric Leonardson, Seiji Morimoto, Aki Onda, Chris Forsyth, Nate Wooley, David Watson, Margareth Kammerer, etc.etc.). Maybe the reason for this also is that it is almost impossible to tour with groups bigger than two, and that I can hook up with the stilisticly most diverse players much easier if I travel alone.

Ignaz Schick