Lookback: Electric Umbrella #7

A GERMAN, A SLOVAK AND A GREEK MET ON STAGE… What happed and what the joke was about, was uncovered after their debut performance curated by Tisa World.

MYSTERY ENSEMBLE is an extension of regular Mystery sessions for interdisciplinary improvisation performances that happen at UBIK. Everyone is welcome to become a part of this ensemble. Come with a minimal setup and join the lightly conducted situational and intuitive merging of performative potentialities.

Performers
Filippos Glinavos is a Greek guitar player, electronic composer and music educator living and working in the Netherlands. Currently, he makes music with the abstract hip-hop duo Million Ear, the electroacoustic free-improvisational duo Bzaka and the Owlgod as well as in various collaborations and as a solo artist, combining his stylistic influences with live electronics, free improvisation and the avant-garde.

Dorota Matejová is a musician, performer, mover and poet, originally from Slovakia, currently based in Rotterdam. She specialises in flauto traverso (the baroque flute), and graduated in ´Early music´ from conservatories in Amsterdam and The Hague. She grew up surrounded by experimental and contemporary music, and uses her instrument in physical/movement theatre, improvisation and in contemporary music contexts. She plays as a solo performer and in duo DOLU ensemble (traverso + baroque violin). She is an initiator and maker of various interdisciplinary performances, combining music, movement and her poems. Currently she is working on publishing her very first collection of poetry in collaboration with visual artist Silver J. Bosch.

Konrad Bogen is a young pianist from South Germany. He is active as a songwriter and musician, writing for artists in the German and international scene. He often goes by train, and likes to ask himself, if every city would be a sound, what would the journey sound like. Being an active programmer, he connects musical song structures to graphs that are stored in computers, dream-like patterns of association. He has worked with artists such as Paul Brody, Clueso, Max Prosa, Norman Sinn, and Alma Naidu. At age 16, he was invited to sit in with Pee Wee Ellis and headlined his own trio tour. Konrad currently studies computer science at TU Berlin.

Tisa N. Herlec performs, writes, organises, communicates and creates imaginaries (with sound, voice, in texts and images). In her vocal performances, she sources a song from the non-conscious, using extended techniques and exploring the capacities of the voice, empowering it and imaginatively playing with structures, narratives, poetry and presence.
She thinks and practises composition & improvisation, exploring their emancipatory and interactive potentials – conducting Mystery Sessions for interdisciplinary performance practitioners and hosting interviews at The Side Entrance radio show on Radio WORM.

Improv at WORM – the story
Not everyone knows that WORM and improv go way way back in time. WORM and what? OK.. improvised music. WORM, being a production place for authentic and spontaneous creative processes, has always had improvisation in the core of its DNA. Music in itself is ungovernable and its definitions and genre divisions are not our central interest – improvisation has many different, heterogenous and divergent definitions. We allow all of them to coexist, intertwine and mingle, creating an environment where an experience is shared in a specific configuration of time, space and sound.

Local and international improvisers merge, exchange and offer an excitingly unpredictable sound experience in every edition of this series, created by five local curators with diverse approaches to improvised music under the common name Electric Umbrella. An experience that may sometimes be short-circuited, other times overcharged, sparkling, crackling… and always empowering!