“Braun’s music is like a multi-movement symphony: feverish, swelling and subsiding, expressive, hyper-nervous — shimmering strings over pounding electronic rhythms — a stage-ready music, perfectly suited to the theme.”
(Radio Drei)

“Beats, dogs barking, wit or gloom, funeral march or comedy — in any case, a kind of staged digital reality-intrusion.”
(Wiebke Hüster, FAZ)

Intimation of Endless Space Given in a Small Window of Time (approximately 10 minutes) presents the work of composer Ethan Braun and graphic designer Lina Grumm as co-authors for the first time. In their discrete practices they strive to produce differentiated environments that interrogate conventions in the sonic and graphic fields, working with sound, score, opera, performance, graphics, collage, writing, and publishing. This exhibition expands these individual inquiries into deviation as an enabling counterpoint to the flattening horizons of late capitalism. The title introduces the inquiry into deviation, as it diagrams aspects from each of their fields. Graphic design is often expected to announce, here information is intimated. Music gives body to temporality, here two durations are activated in parallel, the endless, and the small window. The title models an exhibition experience that exaggerates duration and destabilises hierarchies of information. This establishes a field of polyphony, combining a number of voices and parts. Each day of the exhibition’s duration is unique as it cycles through a calendarised sonic score. A graphic rendition of the calendar provides a detailed ‘aerial view’ of the compositions and how they occupy the exhibition’s ‘window of time’. While the use of visual codes of a standard calendar suggests a linear progression, it is placed within the field of polyphonic composition. Lina and Ethan draw from a variety of approaches to notation with multiple interpretations of the sonic-spatial score whether on a visual, acoustic, or emotional level.

Interview with Ethan and Lina in Art Paper NZ
Blot special feature
exhibition guide

“Fiddler! A Musical” presents musical theater as an experimental tradition. The show is inspired by the Broadway hit “Anatevka (Fiddler on the Roof),” which popularized Yiddish art and shaped the pop cultural representation of Judaism for many years. “Fiddler! A Musical” travels through the traditions of Jewish performance art of the 20th century – from Russia to Berlin to New York – and explores them in the context of exile, displacement and state violence. The piece delves into the underworlds of Jewish mysticism full of demons, witches and ghosts, while Yiddish cabaret, vaudeville, expressive dance, stand-up comedy and the Broadway musical bring the stage landscape to life. This musical extravaganza is accompanied by a cabaret of performers, dancers, singers, live orchestra and guests such as Peaches and the soloist ensemble Kaleidoskop.

Act II:

Swan Songs is an evening-length immersive operatic work that explores the melodramatic ending in opera, the “swan song.” Set in three acts the music alternates short chorales with long scenes of dense electronic music. Thousands of samples from opera coalesce into the electronic sound, which is spectrally analyzed, rendered into MIDI, and orchestrated for the live musicians. The music asks the performers the impossible: to play what a computer thinks is happening in the sound. The computer can’t know; its vantage points of MIDI and time-based data offer only one insufficient lens onto music. The “impossibility” of the ensemble’s parts double the impossibility of the computer’s transcription, and from this strange doubling emerges the opera in all its absurd, playful self.

Music and concept: Ethan Braun | Libretto: Vikram Devasthali | Performed by: Lucy Dhegrae, Tariq Al-Sabir, Contemporaneous | Conducted by: David Bloom | Art direction, design: HIT | Costumes, makeup: Sarah Letalik | Light: Abigail Hoke-Brady | Production: Zachary James Ritter | Score preparation: Roman Viñuesa and Peter Häublein | Tariq Al-Sabir, voice | Lucy Dhegrae: voice

In her film and sound works realised using the collage technique, the artist explores individual and collective memory. Her sound, video installation and LP «Vulnérable Witness» picks up on latent premonitions, things that can be heard through walls and protests, alluding to the fragility of the world order, whose changes often announce themselves quietly but audibly. 

The six sound pieces consist of different speech sounds that overlap and mix with atmospheric recordings from nature: An orchestra warming up, guitar sounds and the buzzing of flies, a babble of language ranging from commercial jargon to meditations on sleep, the voice of a teenager describing a series of disaster scenarios, fragments of radio programmes, voices in stairwells, dripping taps and flickering neon lights. All these elements, cut out of everyday life, suggest micro-fictions of very current, fragile temporalities. 

The idea for the work initially came from the notes I took of my daughter during the pandemic, when she started sketching out various disaster scenarios and asking us parents how we would react to each one. In February 2022, when Russia started the war against Ukraine and the first demonstrations against the war took place, I started to develop the work further. Some of the soundscapes relate to the current political situation, while others allude to very personal levels.

Produced & mixed by Ethan Braun | Mastering by Sam Jones | Artwork by HIT | Editing by Anita Di Bianco | Label: Jacques Linard, Still life with shells and coral, ca. 1630

Shahryar Nashat’s installation “Reverse Rorschach” is a dynamic self-portrait that translates his physiological data into evolving visual and auditory experiences. Throughout the exhibition at LUMA Arles, Nashat wore a monitoring device that continuously recorded his vital signs. These readings were processed by machine-learning algorithms, specifically Google’s text-to-image generator, Imagen, to produce Rorschach-like visuals. This process effectively reversed the traditional Rorschach test, where instead of viewers interpreting static inkblots, they were presented with images directly reflecting the artist’s real-time physical and mental state. Composer Ethan Braun scored the installation, providing 40 original pieces that corresponded to the 10 emotional states in Rorschach psychoanalysis. These pieces, wrought by samples from popular music interpolated with Braun’s signature harmonic sensibility and electronic sound production, played a crucial role in immersing viewers in the artist’s fluctuating emotional and physical condition. The continuous generation of sound pieces, aligned with the artist’s physiological data, offers an intimate and dynamic auditory experience that complements the visual aspects of the installation.

Approaching the train ride from Berlin to Luckenwalde as a site itself for meaning-making and storytelling Lewis, Tolaas, and Braun score the 30 minute journey addressing multiple senses in a new work entitled H_SPACE_H. H_SPACE_H is a partitur that the public moves through in which smells, movements and sounds are guiding elements that amplify the experience of the bodily passage through the space and time between Berlin and Luckenwalde. H_SPACE_H unfolds in multiple stages and all of the elements come together as a new ambulatory live art work that will make its premiere on 30 July 2022.

H_SPACE_H commences on 30 April 2022 as a smell intervention on a carriage of the RE3 train from Berlin/Südkreuz to Luckenwalde, produced from the idiosyncratic smell of EW’s production of electricity, which Tolaas sourced while on a site visit to E-WERK. In June the work grows to include subtle movements, gestures, and indications choreographed and created by Isabel Lewis and finally in July an immersive and multi-site sound component performed by Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop and composed by Ethan Braun is brought together with smell and movement interventions. The attunement process that begins on the train continues from the bahnhof in Luckenwalde to the site of the former Mendelsohn Hutfabrik near the E-WERK. Developing techniques of bodily attunement to ecology and practices for transformation of our relation to our biosocial surroundings have long been at the center of the collaboration between Isabel Lewis and Sissel Tolaas. They continue to apply their methodologies in this new collaboration with Ethan Braun and Kaliedoskop.

On 30 July, the third and final train intervention will take place, starting at 14:41 and 15:47 on the RE3 train from Südkreuz. A procession will lead visitors from Luckenwalde train station to E-WERK for tours of the power station and Stadtbad. The tours end at the Mendelsohn Hat Factory where artists Isabel Lewis & Sissel Tolaas, together with Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop and composer Ethan Braun, will create a moving and growing performance that will take the audience on a journey through sounds, movements and noises.

Objects are never just objects. Objects are many-sided things. They are agents, witnesses, spirits and stories; objects are situated, relational, complex and sensitive. Objects can remember – they are not only repositories of the latent memories, histories and places embedded within them, but they have also been formed, touched, worn, used, and cared for by the multiple interactions. They have traversed on their own journeys. Objects can also ask difficult, challenging and uncomfortable questions. They can bring to life traumatic as well as celebrated pasts. And when we meet them, their biographies and ours intersect.

Zones of Potential Encounters takes as its point of departure six of the over 85,000 inventoried objects of the Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte SKKG in Winterthur, which inherited an eclectic collection after the death of its founder, Bruno Stefanini. The vast collection is multi-faceted, conflicted and many uncertainties remain to be clarified. The exhibition sets six disparate objects from the SKKG collection into new relations as a suggestion of future possibilities for encountering collected objects, with all their potentials and problems – not only for the objects of the SKKG collection.

The exhibition was conceived as an experimental “zone of encounter” which provide for different modes of interacting with objects. It explores strategies of polyphony; of critical fabulation and speculative story-telling; of situating objects through enabling multiple vantage points from both local, contemporary and historical actors as ways to set objects in relation. allows for a multi-sensorial and pluriversal approach to encountering objects; it acts as a proposition in creating a space to encounter the diverse histories connected to each object on display both through feeling and the intellect.

Exchange between Ethan Braun and Sally Schoenfeldt

Ethan Braun’s “TSTCHM” is a performance piece that delves into Jewish liturgical traditions, specifically referencing the phrase “Tseitchem l’’shalom” from the concluding verse of the Shabbat song “Shalom Aleichem.” In this work, Braun recites Psalms 119 and 120-134, known as “Shir HaMaalot,” accompanied by electronic music. The performance was featured during the “Mapping Memories – Ver(antw)ortung Börneplatz” festival, hosted by the Judengasse Museum in Frankfurt.

The title “TSTCHM” is derived from the transliteration of “Tseitchem,” meaning “your departure” or “your going.” The installation premiered at the Judengasse Museum, located near the gas and utilities administration building that now stands on the grounds of the Börneplatz Synagogue—a synagogue once frequented by luminaries such as Hannah Arendt, Stefan Zweig, and Martin Buber.

Directed toward this building, “TSTCHM” employed 10 speakers to project sounds that intertwined documentary recordings of prayer and song from the synagogue with Braun’s own readings of psalms and Groucho Marx’s “Hello, I Must Be Going.” This combination humorously and poignantly addressed the profound injustice of the shrine’s destruction and the cynical staging of its return in “such a charged location. Through the piece, Braun’s sounds seemed to echo both a solemn farewell and a biting critique: “Hello,” it said, “I must be going.”

In “The Seventy Deadly Sins” the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop explores the relationship between humans, animals and plants. Developed by the Israeli stage director Ariel Efraim Ashbel together with the French-Congolese artist Paul Maheke and the American composer Ethan Braun, this performative-musical installation depicts human protagonists adopting animal- and plant-like strategies that enable them to increasingly peel away their human shell. The project seeks speculative possibilities for humans to coexist with animals and plants on a less hierarchical basis that surmounts the dichotomy between humans and animals, culture and nature, and reason and sin. What can we learn from the specific sensuality of flora and fauna?

Seventy compositional and performative miniatures comprise the frame of the investigation. Ariel Efraim Ashbel arranges the sequences into a spatial score characterised by the non-hierarchical interplay of performers, musicians, plants, objects and sounds. Mimicry, improvisation, deceleration and rooting are used as strategies to free oneself from the composition and disciplining of the musician’s body in order to achieve a unique form of collective musical performance. Throughout the performance, the artists look for those moments in which something originally non-human, animalistic, botanical and informal reveals new possibilities.

Artistic director: Ariel Efraim Ashbel, Boram Lie | Composer: Ethan Braun | Set designer: Paul Maheke | Light: Joseph Wegmann | Dramaturge: Anna von Glasenapp | Sound: Olivia Oyama | Artists: Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, Jessica Gadani 

Subconsciously planned in Mexico City and subsequently recorded inside a coffee roasting facility in Los Angeles, Sam Gendel and Ethan Braun’s Rio Nilo 66 is as elliptical, elusive and unexpected as anything in the oeuvre of either artist. Equatorial and humid, the collection includes often hushed, microtonal pieces; 4th dimensional saxophone improvisations; post-language incantations; and a climactic meditation on mindfulness from iconoclastic actor Bill Murray. Originally released on a 30-piece run of vinyl in Dec. 2019, Rio Nilo 66 is available digitally with Ulyssa and as a limited cassette.

“Each essay acts as program notes that describe, or circumscribe the music. They’re tethered to the music like the music tethers sounds to time,” Braun writes of READ ME’s unique presentation. A record released as a series of written texts (and published on an empty, screen-printed record jacket), READ ME is a deeply conceptual formation of musical ideas that appeals to many senses. It is written for ensembles of varying sizes, taking in instrumentation both classical and modern, and gently, delicately unfolds into a deft and singular experience.

With READ ME, Braun poses the question: “what is music supposed to be?” The album’s compositional process deliberately evades meaning and purpose, offering instead a transparent, level relationship between listener, music, composer and performer. In other words: anyone can determine what this music is for. And by framing them within a written text, these pieces can be read as if one and the same medium as the document.

Opening with an 18-minute exploratory dreamscape for bass clarinet, vibraphone, piano and cello, READ ME sets an early tone of acute attention to detail and minute, cellular sonics. Lead track “Me, Mi Relato” is a viola solo performed by Danielle Wiebe Burke. It dances and twists through incidental squeals and creaks, disguising a deep-rooted melancholy in its dynamic intensity.

Written for piano trio and electronics, What we call progress takes its title from Walter Benjamin’s brief thesis on Paul Klee’s painting, “Angelus Novus.” Written for “three piano trios (two digital, one real)” the work expands upon my series of studies in using sampler instruments together with live ensembles to create an effect composer Steven Takasugi calls “strange doubling,” where one isn’t sure whether one hears the live instrument or the electronic one.

Piano: Vicki Ray | Violin: Alyssa Park | Cello: Timothy Loo

Ambition. Ambience. The first term involves desire. The second term involves atmosphere. Desire for, desire to,”ambition” tends to be associated with a kind of achievement, while one can hardly hope to achieve ambience’s atmosphere. Both share a Latin root. “Ambītus” could mean “having encircled,” a “circuit,” “having surrounded.” In English, the term could be used in reference to the range of a melody.

In some cases, one’s ambition can lead one to a kind of madness. One encircles, one paces back and forth, progresses towards, regresses away, aspires to, rejected by that desirable, whatever it may be. An ambience encircles us, envelops us, but it’s a thing to which we can barely attend; it’s nebulous, or vaporous.

Bernard Marie-Koltès described his 1985 work “In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields“ like an encounter between a bluesman and a punk. Perhaps more than an exploration of mercantile activity or the transaction of late-night cruising, his play is a speculation on the individual’s capacity to know another.

Inspired by Koltes’ preoccupation with ‘the deal’,The WANT is an exchange sung by four performers, with a libretto that is littered with interjections from Jacques Derrida to Missy Elliott. It approaches the business of language as the Self’s gateway drug between rational thought and rhapsodic expression. Doesn’t the interplay of language rendered in vocal music parallel the dynamics of various markets? The singers, actors and dancers Jess Gadani, Justin F. Kennedy, Jasmine Orpilla, and Roger Sala Reyner are ‘Offerors’ and ‘Offerees’ enrobed as the key archetype of mercantile Europe. Engaging a virtuosic performativity, these players embody the spiritual tradition of that figure: a constant trade between a reflexive mind and sensuous being.

Direction: Adam Linder | Music: Ethan Braun | With: Jessica Gadani, Justin F. Kennedy, Jasmine Orpilla, Roger Sala Reyner | Stage Design & Light: Shahryar Nashat | Libretto in collaboration with: Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer | Dramaturgic Consultancy: Ariel Efraim Ashbel | Sound Engineer: Sam Jones | Saxophone: Sam Gendel | Instrumental-/Audio-Samples: Steven Takasugi & Ethan Braun | Technical Director: Sebastian Zamponi | Sound Technician: Torsten Schwarzbach | Lights Technician: Martin Beeretz | Management: Andrea Niederbuchner | Production Assistant: Anna von Glasenapp | Graphic Design: Lina Grumm – HIT Studio | With special thanks to: Jarrett Gregory & Steffen Martin

“The Lost Ones for 100 brass quintets (99 digital 1 real) takes its title from the Samuel Beckett novella of the same name. Inspired by divergent sources – the Beckett, performances and songs by Meshell Ndegéocello “Priorities 1-6,” George Carlin’s “Modern Man,” The Streets “Let’s push things forward,” Jimi Hendrix’s “May this be Love,” Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s banter with the audience in “Bright Moments,” and Lauryn Hill’s “Rebel” – The Lost Ones arises at an intersection of live performance and the anonymity and immersiveness of digital media. The headings, named in deference to those listed above are as follows:

Prologue: “All I got is…time to spend… wasted time”
I: “The high-tech low-lifes”
II: “Put on yer mittens for these sub-zero conditions”
III: “I can see my rainbow calling me” / ”… can I get my spirit back?”
Epilogue: “wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up”

The music was composed as an impossibly virtuosic work for a perhaps impossible ensemble – the 99 digital quintets. The live, “real,” quintet performs a reduction of the digital music. This reduction was made with the assistance of software old and new, in addition to the composer’s eyes, ears, and hands. The live performers are presented with a formidable challenge, as the music they’re given to play lies at the limit of possibility. It’s digital music.