liquid room VI

In close collaboration with curator Berno Odo Polzer and Ensemble Mosaik we designed a new Liquid Room for the opening of the upcoming MaerzMusik festival (MaerzMusik — Festival for Time Issues).

Since 5 years Ictus is experimenting with the Liquid Room format, a lengthy concert program that always unfolds in a single curve on at least four stages, according to the rules of echo, crossfading or contrast. The audience is free to stroll around an empty stage, remain standing, loll about on the floor or make use of one of our cardboard stools we provide. The Liquid Room experience has led us to this unexpected finding: the scope for pacing up and down in a large hall, to listen very close-up or further away, to choose when and how to listen, to head to the bar and head back – in a nutshell, the kind of freedom you do not expect to find during a classical concert actually enhances the audience's attention, makes them more alert, strangely enough. The public is allowed to observe and discover the 240 minutes non-stop music performance we prepared for Berlin. Special attention for the black hole in the program designed by the legendary Bruce Mc Clure (New York) with his three 16 mm projectors, carefully ‘prepared’ as one could prepare a piano, producing images infected by a whole set of strobes on stands and producing sound he can transform on the spot using a whole battery of guitar pedals. After his intense set right in the middle of the evening follows the enigmatic string quartet of the Swiss composer Jürg Frey, a work in the spirit of zero time prized by Christian Wolff, circular time as sheer contemplation on sound.