Elektroakustischer Salon: Phill Niblock / Thomas Ankersmit / Konrad Sprenger at Berghain / Wednesday, 23.05.2018

To celebrate 50 years of creating music and films – and his 85th birthday – legendary New York minimalist Phill Niblock will be giving a handful of special audiovisual concerts with Thomas Ankersmit in 2018. The two artists will perform together as well as individually, presenting new electronic music created collaboratively, plus some of Niblock’s rarely presented – and recently restored – early work.

While Niblock’s instrumental-acoustic music has profoundly influenced generations of artists from rock to electronica and beyond – Sonic Youth, Sunn O))) and Carsten Nicolai have all dedicated works to him – until now he has never composed electronic music. Inspired by Ankersmit’s unique skills for creating complex, organic sound forms with his Serge Modular, Niblock has now started creating live electronic music for the first time. Thomas Ankersmit will perform new material exploring infrasound, large resonant buildings, and otoacoustic emissions. These are sounds that are actually created by and inside the listeners’ own ears, changing dramatically with the slightest movement of the head. Ankersmit is also developing new work based on the legacy of Pierre Schaeffer, commissioned by GRM and Deutschlandradio, as well as a new spatial sound performance for the 4DSOUND system.

Konrad Sprenger is a Berlin-based artist, composer, and music producer. Influenced by the insistent rhythms of minimalism, krautrock, and techno, Sprenger focusses on the transcendent power of propulsive, full-spectrum sound. He plays a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar that he developed himself. With this setup he creates complex rhythmic patterns, automatically retunes the strings during performance, and radically expands the possibilities of the guitar – sounding like anything from an electronic instrument, to various traditional string instruments, to a full orchestra.