Maike Zazie

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Maike Zazie is a pianist and a composer. Holder of magistra degrees in literature with highest honors from both the Humboldt Universität and Freie Universität of Berlin, she has also studied in Tübingen and Uppsala (Sweden).

Influenced by this passion for both music and literature, she creates and performs unconventional piano compositions: operating at the crossroads of these two art forms, her medium becomes a type of sonic literature in both form and content. She composes pieces of music as she puts stories down on paper, choosing notes as carefully as she chooses words. For Maike, sound is a language which enables storytelling. Her music is to be received as an experimental radio play, voice theatre, or as a sonic essay.


FACTS:

1: Animals feel.
2: I sleep under a chestnut tree.
3: Time is passing.

QUESTIONS:

1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?

My own life, my close people around me, experiences. Also: Books and other music.

2. How and when did you get into making music?

I has been growing up with a grand piano in the living room, with a father who is playing several instruments and I started playing instruments as a very little child. But it took a long time until I started writing & playing my own music. As a teenager I was still busy with interpretations of Chopin & Satie while I was listening to Tori Amos and Bjšrk. My creative output was still focused in writing lyric poetry. Then at the age of 16 I took my first Cello lessons and was mostly interested in free playing. At the same time i started recording little fragments of self written piano music. When I re-found them in the beginning of my twenties with a new friend of mine in Berlin I created my solo project ZAZIE VON EINEM ANDEREN STERN.

3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?

Tori Amos BOYS FOR PELE
Midaircondo SHOPPING FOR IMAGES
Four Tet PAUSE
Bjšrk VESPERTINE
Goldfrapp FELT MOUNTAIN

4. What do you associate with Berlin?

Freedom. Dirt. Trees. Home.

5. What’s your favourite place in your town?

Maybe the wild grassland on Tempelhofer Feld in late summer when the grass is around half a metre high. I lie there on a blanket in the middle of nowhere looking in the sky – it only takes me a ten minutes bike ride to let the whole city disappear.

6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?

Get a garden & turn it into a jungle. Take my cats there. Get some chairs and a table from the flea market or build them by myself. Bake a pie with raspberries from my garden. Sit in the wilderness to write poetry while I still hear the city noise through the wind and the trees sometimes.

7. What was the last record/music you bought?

Otto A Totland THE LOST

8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?

Wintergatan & Midaircondo.

9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?

Sigur ros on their Tour 2001 @ Dreikšnigskirche in Frankfurt am Main. I was young and the whole church was filled with sound up to the roof.

10. How important is technology to your creative process?

I appreciate technical mediums in every kind of creative work as I am mostly working by myself.
And I love the possibility of creating a very detailed sound collage as I would never be able to do it analogue. I just bought a doormat with the RADIOHEAD quote “Everything in its right place”. The computer makes it possible to set every little tune “in its right place”.

11. Do you have siblings and how do they feel about your career/art?

I always wanted to have a twin sister or a big brother. Only Child though.


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