By Paul Acquaro
FRIDAY
It's a full house at the Exploratorium, a performance space tucked away in
Berlin's bubbling Kreuzberg district. The Serious Series, a small but rather
astounding avant-garde and experimental music festival, now in its 13th edition, is about to begin. The organizers of the event also happen to be the
first performers: saxophonist Anna Kaluza and bassist Jan Roder.
The duo, which released an album in 2022, Am Frankfurter
Tor (Relative Pitch),
helped ease the crowd into the music. Gentle, at first, Kaluza's tone was
subdued and notes flowing while Roder filled the lower-register with quick,
supportive walking lines. Playing acoustically, without amplification, the
sound was crisp and balanced, so clear that one could hear his musical
thoughts as he hummed his lines (no, not like Keith Jarrett's hair-raising
screeches) behind Kaluza's whimsical melodic snippets. Their music unfolded
like a chain of small musical events, tallying up to a cohesive composition
in the end.
Similar could be said of the entire festival which stretched out for three
nights of the weekend. Each night presented three groups, each of which
seemed to both contrast and compliment the other. Following Kaluza and Roder
was the trio of pianist Marina Džukljev, bassist Christian Weber and drummer
Michael Griener who released the excellent recording Industriesalon
(Trouble in the East)
earlier this year. Here, they started off with a provocative bass-line,
followed by a tense run of notes from the piano and a very disciplined use
of percussion. Džukljev's classical background provided a framing for their
music as she created a lush harmonic bed with an austere, tense, melody.
Weber and Griener worked deftly to sustain the tension and amp up the
excitement as the music gained momentum, traveling further and further out.
The explosive moments played well the quieter, exploratory ones, leaving the
audience primed and ready for the last set of the night.
British saxophonist Evan Parker and dutch woodwindist Peter van Bergen took
the stage area and began the set with Van Bergen's gentle bass clarinet
throbbing against a jittery melody from Parker's soprano saxophone, kinetic
and nuanced interplay ensued. For the next piece, van Bergen switched to the
the contrabass clarinet, an instrument whose range and timbre is capable of
separating the soul from the body. His approach stopped short of that,
though he did offer deep, woodsy tones in a captivating solo piece. Parker
also performed a solo piece in his signature circular breathing style with
quick wide intervallic jumps and kaleidoscopic melodic ideas. The two closed
the set with an agitated piece featuring the contra-bass clarinet and
soprano sax, both giving each other plenty of sonic space.
SATURDAY
The audience was a bit thinner on the second night, likely due to the sheer
number of concerts and events happening around the city - a quick look at
echtzeitmusik.de
, the northern light of the experimental music scene, was basically a direct
injection of FOMO.
However, the opening act of trumpeter Artur Majewski and
guitarist/daxophonist Kazuhisa Uchihashi was not one to miss.
Majewski fed his trumpet through electronic processing to create an
atmospheric and metallic tone, while Uchihashi summoned souls on the
intriguingly rare daxophone - essentially a wooden theremin played with a
bow that creates sounds spaning from human-like complaining to unearthly
wailing. Uchihashi, who collaborated closely with the instruments creator
Hans Reichel, is a master of the sensitive instrument and together with the
straight ahead but adorned tones of the trumpet, began generating a talking
drum like sound from and fell into a medium tempo groove that as it went on,
began to unravel. Uchihashi later switched to guitar and the conversation
flowed easily between melodic improvisations and eerie UFO effects.
The duo was followed by Biliana Voutchkova's Dara String quartet, comprised
of Voutchkova and Joanna Mattrey on violin, Isidora Edwards on cello and
Vinicius Cajado on bass. The quartet began with a great dissonance, Cajado's
bass throbbed as the others' legato notes had a swirling effect. Then,
emerging from the audience, in what was first probably blamed a ring-tone,
were sounds of bird chirps and hissing, but with which the group was tonally
in sync. The music progressed slowly, each player taking the music in
different directions. Then, things got wild at the Exploratorium: Cajado
took percussion mallets to his strings, Mattrey flipped her instrument
upside down, while Voutchkova began making thirsty zombie sounds. Perhaps it
was somehow the tinfoil wad between Edwards' strings that then helped bring
the group back together to a composed end.
The final set of the night began quietly, so much so that a clink of a glass
in the audience was louder than the fractured muted tones from saxophonist
Matthias Schubert's quartet with Emily Wittbrodt on cello, Ronny Graupe on
guitar and Christian Marien on drums. Schubert's keys clapping was audible
as was Graupe's playing of the tuning pegs of his 8 string guitar. The key
to listening, however, was patience. Eventually with a boom from Marien, the
disparate tones cohered into more abrasive tone from the sax, textures from
the guitar and cascade of musical lines from the cello. The next piece was
more rhythmic and the final one was the head-bopping rocker with a baroque
B-section and a heavy metal coda.
SUNDAY
The final evening, Sunday, began with the effervescent PIVOT, a duo
featuring American ex-pats Liz Allbee on trumpet and Chris Heenan on
contrabass clarinet. From the start, the rich, reverberant and flatulent
tones of the contrabass clarinet laid an unusual sonic foundation. Building
on subtle rhythmic figures, the duo engaged in a call-and-response that
replaced melody and harmony with intention and timing. Percussive blats from
Heenan were met with agitated jabs from Allbee, who also explored many the
possible configurations of her horn. Overall, the set was a playful start to
the evening.
Guitarist Olaf Rupp began his set with an exploratory set of chord fragments
on a well-worn classical guitar. Connected though a stream of consciousness,
the tonal nodules and fleeting runs were delivered with alternating density.
The chord voicings were unexpected - hardly a B♭7♭5 or E7♭9 to be heard, but
rather ones that if written out would look like calculus. An uptempo section
followed, then the application of a violin bow to the guitar strings. A
fully satisfying moment came towards the end where the various strands of
notes, rhythms and chord parts came idiosyncratically and wonderfully together.
The festival's closer, renowned pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, opened
the set with a series of bright chords at a mid-tempo gait. Saxophonist
Henrik Walsdorff jumped in with a distinctly articulated and slightly sour
melody. Then, bassist Antonio Borghini and Jan Leipnitz pushed the pulse and
tempo towards an uptempo romp. The latter was a standout, his drumming
fitting the music perfectly, with both light and heavy technique behind its
swing. Schlippenbach, still spry at the keyboard, dropped fiery phrases
between the angular riffs bookending the tunes.
A strong end to an excellent festival, Serious Series 2025, returning after
a short hiatus last year, provided a showcase of the diverse and creative
improvisational music scene in Berlin and beyond. Looking forward to the
next one!
