Bio
A guitarist since 13 years old with explorative instinct, I studied Javanese and Balinese gamelan music, then played a self-styled percussion set-up, oud and rebab with the dance theatre company Djalma Primordial Science.
Reintroducing again the guitar, prepared and on the table, in 2000, evolving with the use of hacked electronic gear, mixing desk and phonography a style of musique concrete, I continued performance and pedagogical work with dancer Ephia and began collaborations with various Berlin-based musicians; at first Michael Vorfeld, Michael Walz, and then eventually others. By the time of leaving New Mexico in 2005, I had introduced the laptop and developed new electronic processing systems which gave me further flexibility and means to express my aesthetic imaginations.
Although I still play traditional acoustic guitar, I primarily concerned with all kinds of sounds and how they are brought together and where this becomes music in our minds and why. Maybe there is music outside our minds? But how do we know it? I find myself a question mark between forms seemingly implicit and autonomous in nature and the inadequacy of rational reductionism. I was aided in finding this an inspiration by studying the works and theories of Iannis Xennakis.
I was assisted in my re-evaluation of how I use sound by a short collaboration with Keith Rowe, whom I felt had already a long-standing intuition about these matters. After Keith, I recognized three other contributors to my tendency to deconstruct from the center called “the guitar”, namely Kevin Drumm, Annette Krebs and Pascal Battus. Studying with Helmut Lachenmann, trying to clarify for myself the relationship between indeterminate music, improvisation and an at least personally coherent system of notations, I was impressed (again) by the idea that there is a historical and ideological struggle (a graphic struggle, also) implicit in musical practice. Serialism, only as a way of organizing periodicities, is a theatre of patterns, must order to the point of chaos or growing disorder. It is recurrence of events, like Jani Christou’s score for the lunar cycle, that generates our sense of stabilities.