At the Festival für selbstgebaute Musik the national and international DIY music scene opens up a huge space of opportunity for everyone. This is where nerds meet the curious, children meet artists and musicologists meet newbies. One intense festival day will open up unknown sound spaces – tricky or simple, electronic or analog, to listen to, to touch and to build with your own hands.
Among sonorous encounters at craft booths, in workshops and intimate small performances on the Holzmarkt grounds, you can look forward to exciting concerts in the Säälchen.
As every year you can build music yourself! There are numerous stands offering opportunities to build instruments. In Daniel Bornmann’s Flaschenschmiede plastic bottles are turned into instruments, at Klang-Holz e.V. a simple string instrument is made from so-called garbage. Numerous installations and workshops invite visitors to touch sound, see tones and feel vibrations.
Both well-known and newly-acquainted artists from the DIY scene help interested visitors to discover the world with completely different ears. Every year, the festival for self-made music manages to bring together artists from a wide range of approaches and genres. What unites them all is the desire to go on a expedition beyond musical conventions and given standards. Once again this year, exciting international artists will be gathering here.
The lovingly disorganized sound experiments of French artist Jacques, who cuts, loops and stages acoustic and visual footage, the electro-rumbarock project Kin’gongolo Kiniata from Kinshasa delights with Congolese-urban rhythms, played with virtuosity on instruments made from recycled canisters, tin cans and other supposed leftovers. Another gem of the DIY music scene is El Khat – they rediscover traditional Arabic sounds and combine them with modern beats on minimalist and very personal instruments.
With improvised, found and invented sounds, Mexican artist Marisol Jiménez will involve listeners in her intensive aesthetic multimedia explorations, presenting sound sculptures and experiments. This year there are three focal points: first, the sound of water drops, second the acoustic dimension of books. The third focus can be considered a core competence of the festival: listening to the sound of the city, whose architecture appears as a resonance chamber. SgM has invited the artists Agente Costura, Beltership and Laure Boer to each compose with urban sounds in their own way.
