The Berlin ensemble gamut inc—around composer duo Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki—is dedicated to music theater and machine music with a thematic focus on the critical use of technology.
Since 2013, gamut inc has been performing with self-built music machines and playing internationally automatable pipe organs. Since 2019, they have curated the AGGREGATE Festival in Berlin. They have recently released recordings on Morphine Records and WERGO and have received numerous grants, including the Villa Kamogawa Grant in Kyoto, Japan. Their organ installation AGGREGAT#11, commissioned by the Sónar Festival, premiered in 2022 and was subsequently acquired for the permanent collection of the Palau Güell in Barcelona. Marion Wörle and Maciej Sledziecki are considered pioneers of the automated pipe organ and key figures in the development of the “New Organ Movement.” With their different backgrounds in electronic and instrumental music, they complement each other perfectly as a well-aligned composition team.
They are currently developing their own modular organ with proportional wind control per pipe in collaboration with the Tony Decap organ building company.
Questions and Answers
3 FACTS
1: As artists, we resist being pinned down
2: Sometimes it works
3: Sometimes it doesn’t
11 QUESTIONS
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
We’re still in this intense, ongoing amour fou with the organ. By controlling it with computers, entirely new modes of playing become available – things the instrument was never designed for but somehow can do. In so many ways this beast has fallen out of time. To listen to it in these remarkable acoustic spaces, to experience the music physically, viscerally – it’s a perpetuum mobile, constantly generating new ideas about what’s actually possible.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
We both had multiple entry points into music – rock, jazz, electronics. Marion studied architecture and specialized in spatial acoustics. Maciej studied guitar and composition. But a second awakening came in 2009 when we first controlled the organ at Kunst-Station St. Peter with a computer. That moment has shaped our artistic practice ever since.
3. How does your project address the ethical and copyright-related issues that arise from the use of AI in music/composition?
We use open-source tools and train them exclusively on our own data: organs we’ve sampled ourselves, like the Utopa baroque organ in Amsterdam, or field recordings. We don’t hand over compositional agency to AI, but use it more like it’s used in biochemistry: comparing datasets, analyzing processes, and refining code to create micro-forms and sounds otherwise impossible to generate instantly with an organ. We develop the musical forms ourselves, though we might use AI more for prototyping in the future and last but not least to create the permutations of the setup of the pipes of our modular organ.
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
Now that winter kicks in – and they can be famously long and grey here – the urge to escape typically sets in. But as soon as we’re away, we find ourselves longing for the multi-layered chaos here again.
5. What’s your favorite place in your town?
Right now? Our studio – we just got our new modular organ. Don’t expect to see us outdoors anytime soon.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
Running in circles.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
“Brace for Impact” by Hampus Lindwall – intense organ music with a collaboration featuring Stephen O’Malley from Sunn O))). Lindwall pushes the organ into territories usually associated with doom metal or noise. Listen to the title track!
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
We’re fortunate to already work with amazing partners – we work with organ builders like Tony Decap and their revolutionary smART-Valves technology, and with venues like Orgelpark Amsterdam and LOGOS Foundation. Moving forward, we’d love to deepen these collaborations and expand the New Organ Movement network.
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
In 2024 we did a residency at Toulouse Les Orgues with Yves Rechsteiner’s wind-dynamic organ L’Explorateur. It’s a revolutionary instrument built by Tony Decap that can control the wind pressure of each pipe individually within milliseconds, so the organ really becomes a highly dynamic beast. We loved it so much that it informed our further development, and we’ve now designed our own modular organ with Decap. In a way, this was our best gig in recent times.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
Since we work mostly with automatons, technology is at the core of our work. But if you look closer, music-making and technology are always intertwined. To build a violin bow you need technology similar to that needed to build a hunting bow. All the instruments we see as given are in fact the result of long evolution and technical development. Music is – like it or not – at some level always a technological affair. In our case it seems extreme because we push this aspect to the foreground. However, we’re interested in automated music that doesn’t connect the automatic with the monotony of Ford’s assembly line, but rather with the automatic reactions that happen within the body – what we call reflexes – as well as with the subconscious.
11. How does your project contribute to the development of innovative compositional strategies involving AI?
We’re testing resynthesis algorithms on the organ for the first time – there’s still so much to discover. For our upcoming installation SPECTRAL DIALOGUES, we’re collaborating with the Fraunhofer Institute’s Acoustics Department, training our AI on their research organ. This approach treats the organ as a database of acoustic particles, shifting composition from writing notes to designing systems where AI helps us explore complex timbral combinations.
