Nico Sauer composes, directs, and performs experimental music theater in a delirium of disciplinary boundary-crossing, reveling in the frictions and absurdities between genres, forms, and expectations.
His recent works include Atlantide Acide (2023), a solo opera that uses a microphone probe to explore the sonic depths of the human body; RÜBER (2024, Münchener Biennale), a traffic opera set in the streets of the city, with the audience seated in a moving car; and the upcoming music theater piece Die Kantine (2026, Nationaltheater Darmstadt and Münster), which transforms the opera space into a hybrid, behind-the-scenes environment where the highly artificial and the everyday drama of opera and its operations merge.
Questions and Answers
3 FACTS
1. AI is nothing against our Alien technology.
2. Listening to Spotify causes cancer.
3. Hitchcock didn’t have a belly button.
11 QUESTIONS
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
Noh Theater, the pistachio museum of Gaziantep, and the beautiful dirty noises of life.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
When I was young, I earned money by playing South American and Flamenco songs on guitar with an Argentinian dancer called Lacho Valdez. He must be 90 years old now or older and is definitely immortal. A true legend. At some point, I realized that music is not really about sound but about a specific quality that stitches poses, gestures, rustles, and shags – awkward as they may be – into something coherent, less awkward. Which makes it even more awkward – you know what I mean? So I realized I had the choice between falling apart like a disenchanted golem or dedicating my life to the arcane arts of music.
3. How will you integrate artificial intelligence into your project and which specific AI technologies or tools are you using?
AND
3. How does your project address the ethical and copyright-related issues that arise from the use of AI in music/composition?
AI is a new branding name, a guise of the super villains to conceal them becoming even more evil. It’s not about making music using AI or anything – I don’t see where this is different from making music using a piano – it’s about to keep making in general. Duh my piece is about making in general, yes, but furthermore what I found interesting is to use models as they were to show that they’re nothing but human, not super human – all too human. My project shows the incapacities and puts humans in the limelight, not technology. I’m not interested in technology. I’m interested in humans and humans make and use technology.
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
Swamps, speed, and lonely hearts.
5. What’s your favorite place in your town?
My home/studio.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
I’d probably join a Beatles cover band.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listened to?
Whoops/Ouch!! Music by John Debt.
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
Vitas. (Hope you’re good! Don’t let them catch you!)
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
As a performer, my best gig was RÜBER, which I wrote and directed, but I was also its prisoner and had to play it 75 times in a row within 9 days. I guess it’s called Stockholm syndrome. I’d never do it again. Of course, I would if you made me.
My worst gig was RÜBER, which I wrote and directed, too, but I lost my voice for two days, going around on an e-scooter 9 hours a day, 9 days in a row, with a delivery person’s backpack saying “Wigs, Guns & Cheese.” The Munich neighborhood hated me.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
My first word I uttered into a computer keyboard. No joke. I’d love to live without it, but I don’t. Whatever I do, the computer screen attracts me with its mysterious glow; its frame calms me down and allows me to change parameters in between. That’s also why I like the stage—its frame and its glow, its defined and contained space—so that if you invert it, everything becomes the stage but the stage.
11. How do you plan to present the results of your research at Radialsystem?
It questions the technology by using it to expose its ugly sides, to reveal the humanness within it. It shows that AI is nothing more than a human product that oozes and sweats with embarrassing awkwardness.
Nearest Neighbours is a plug-and-play sound theatre for two performers. one plays the operator, the other the remote. while making it, caroline, one of the performers, mentioned The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree Jr., which she happened to be reading. I had never heard of it, but it was so close to what I was already doing that I borrowed the terms operator and remote. they take turns. they are the same person — brain and body trying to get their life straight. maybe aliens practicing to be human, maybe undercover cops. their houses are empty, no walls, only invisible objects — super sketchy. the AI is human, all too human. it tries to make sense of everything by interpreting the actions with sound. sound is the only thing left to hold on to.
