“How can sound decipher the world and objectify reality? How can sound drive us to learn about the absent realities from a visible landscape?” asks phonographer and installation artist La Casa. Composer and improviser Maierhof counters: “According to me, a renewal within New Music nowadays is only possible by including reality. This would be the opposite conception of music regarded as a vanishing point, a means of escape…” Where do these views meet?
For 20 years, while listening to the environment, Eric La Casa has been questioning the perception of reality and has expanded the notion of what’s musical today. Through his aesthetic of capturing sound, his work fits equally into the fields of sound art and music. As a result of his in-situ listening processes, he creates forms (of attention) that creep into the venues, slowly infuse there, and become other possible spaces. In the same way that the letter stimulates a country’s reading, the in situ aesthetic object renews our
relationship to space and landscape.
Michael Maierhof, German composer based in Hamburg, studied mathematics and music in Kassel and art history and philosophy in Hamburg. He has been writing non-pitched organized music since the early nineties and works with instruments, objects, preparations, applications, oscillating systems and motors. Since 2004 he is the cellist in the improv-trio NORDZUCKER (Hamburg/Berlin) and in the quartet “Stark Bewölkt”. Founder of the “Vernband für aktuelle Musik Hamburg” (vamh.de).