Ensemble Phœnix Basel

“Clash” – a word entirely in the sense of our friend and drummer Daniel Buess, who died in 2016, to whom we dedicate this program. Clashing clashes of different materials, the collision of different worlds require alert listening and watching.

In the eponymous work by Jannik Giger – both composer and video artist — live and pre-recorded music that confronts jazzy sounds with chords from Morton Feldman’s second string quartet collide in an extremely virtuosic and playful manner with a video work that is not only reproduced but also actively influences the performers.

In commissioning André Meier to compose, we are countering Giger’s “Clash” with a work by another young Swiss composer whom we have followed closely for many years.

In a special way, the two composers Alfred Knüsel and Thomas Lauck have “fallen in with our friend Daniel”. However, there can be no question of contradictory clashing; the “clash” here is rather to be understood in the sense of the most intensive confrontation and a very special search for sound. Independently of each other, both composers wrote a work in his memory.

Pre-concert: Education project “AlltagSerialismus”:
All of our everyday life is characterized by a series of recurring elements. The mediation project “AlltagSerialismus” initiated by EPhB together with a school class of the secondary school Leonhard under the direction of Francesca De Felice and Sebastian Meyer tries to critically reflect this “everyday routine”. In the course of the project, four short tape pieces were created in small groups, which will now be presented in a pre-concert by EPhB. In these pieces, sounds/noises that the young people have recorded in their everyday lives are processed in a variety of ways, re-contextualized, analyzed and commented on. In this way, the young people are both sensitized to their everyday sound environment and encouraged to reflect more on their everyday life.