Michael Vorfeld is a Berlin-based musician, improviser, visual artist, and sound artist who plays percussion, self-designed stringed instruments, and light bulbs, often focusing on the use of light and architecture, and working with photography and film. The combination of these instruments, along with his unusual playing techniques and an exceptional variety of sounds.
Sawt Out - Fake Live in America (Self-Released, 2025)
Sawt Out (a word play, as sawt - صوت - means voice or urban music in Arabic) is the Berlin-based experimental, free improvising trio of Lebanese trumpeter (and visual artist and cartoon author, who designed the cover artwork) Mazen Kerbaj and German percussionists Burkhard Beins and Vorfeld (who is also a visual artist), both of them protagonists of the Berlin Echtzeitmusik, who have been working together in various formations. This trio was founded in 2015, soon after Kerbaj relocated to Berlin, and Fake Live in America is its fourth album, recorded live at eleven concerts in June 2023, from the East Coast through the Midwest to the northern West Coast of the United States.
Sawt Out’s three gentlemen have their own idiosyncratic approaches to their acoustic instruments. Kerbaj employs the trumpet as a modular metal machine that transfers air, almost never in a conventional manner. Often it rests between his legs while he blows into a plastic hose connected into its mouthpiece, and, obviously, uses extended breathing techniques. Beins and Vorfeld do magic with skins and metal surfaces, and add to their arsenal self-designed string instruments, balloons, light bulbs, and walkie-talkies. Often, the trio blurs or blends the sonic origins of each instrument.
Fake Live in America is a collage of three extended pieces, made in distinct spaces with different acoustics and different recording qualities, ranging from detailed miking to plain smartphone recordings, mixed and edited by Beins. But this supposedly fake, live sonic collage does not attempt to camouflage Sawt Out’s process of music-making. It distills perfectly the restless and obscure but imaginative ways which the rich, radical, and subversive sound worlds of Kerbaj, Veins, and Vorfeld collide, resonate, and interact. These gifted improvisers sound like different lobes of a greater sonic organism that is experiencing an insightful and visceral psychedelic trip, totally possessed by its powerful and intense music. Sawt Out articulates its enigmatic, thought-provoking textures with captivating playfulness, and great precision and focus on detail.
Michael Vorfeld - Glühlampenmusik (Karlrecords, 2025)
Glühlampenmusic (Light Bulb Music) celebrates Vorfeld’s 20th anniversary of his unique, adventurous sonic explorations, first performed publicly under the same title in the Labor Sonor series at Kule in Berlin in January 2005, and later documented on the album Light Bulb Music (Easy Discs, 2009). The ten short pieces were composed, performed and recorded by Vorfeld in Berlin in 2024. The album is released as a limited edition of 100 numbered cassettes plus a download option.
Vorfeld has been experimenting since the mid-1980s with a multiplicity of partly site-specific light works (most of which also included sound) as a unique combination of electro-acoustic and audio-visual performance. He researched the interplay of light and sound, with various light bulbs, analog light-controlling devices, electrical circuits, and many microphones and pickups to "eavesdrop" into the acoustic potential of the various light events, including the light intensity, and rhythmic variety of the flickering and pulsing lights. Glühlampenmusic suggests how light bulbs can articulate complex dance-like moves with almost "clubby" pulsations, noisy and sparse but mysterious abstractionism, industrial-like textures, and imaginative, hypnotic cinematic ideas.
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