nowhere, OK

Biography

In the middle of Oklahoma, at the intersection of E1280 Road and County Street 2550, lies a small town called „Nowhere“. The name of the place originates from a cynical comment made about where the town is situated – in the middle of endless plains, withouth any marks of industrial civilisation in sight. Yet it stuck as the official town name. If you stumble upon Nowhere, OK while perusing an atlas, you'll be bound to stop for a moment. You'll experience an uneasy feeling, a sense that every corner of the earth has been mapped, catalogued and managed from above – even „nowhere“. In other words: a feeling that no place on this planet can escape the ordering gaze of the satellite. nowhere, OK is an attempt to find a line of flight, a praxis of invisibility that doesn't register on the radar of this systematising gaze; that builds bridges, communicates and enables collective thinking.

Felix Nussbaumer (IT), Nelly Jüsten (DE) and Aya Masui (JP) interpret splinters of scored material and connect them into tightly knit sonic relations through their highly attentive and idiosyncratic improvisational practice. A sense of unresolved ambiguity arises in response to the question of which material was pre-determined, and which emerged from the process of navigation through sonic constellations. The compositions question the notion of linear pieces by not determining formal structures – instead, musicians are confronted with various sonic constructs, towards which they can navigate at any given moment. Thus, a „navigational“ communication emerges, that renders it possible to manipulate and connect static postions or „places“ within a praxis of dynamic, intelligent interplay.

The three performers move between acoustic interplay on their respective instruments and an interdependent electronic way of playing: while one person determines which samples from our field recording archive will be played, another person processes them. This way of interplaying gives each performer power over the others’ musical material. The use of an analog radio generates different sound material depending on the geographical location of the performance; this extends the group’s discourse around themes of unpredictability and site-specific art.

Tag: contemporary, experimental, creative music, improvisation, electronics, field recordings