splitter musik by Splitter Orchester

Hyperdelia is proud to present “splitter musik” - the first Splitter Orchester album solely consisting of the ensemble’s own music. Previous recordings have highlighted the orchestra’s vast genre-bending output in collaboration with George Lewis, The Pitch and Felix Kubin. This 3CD release aptly titled “splitter musik” showcases for the first time the orchestra’s very own musical process.

As a large scale improvising ensemble, Splitter Orchester has no central leader and is organised through direct democratic principles. Founded in 2010, Splitter is a unique collective of composer-performers with various backgrounds in the Echtzeitmusik, free improvisation and experimental music scenes in Berlin. Despite the long lasting collaboration and the mostly consistent line-up of musicians, the band maintains an incredible dynamism, continuously reinventing concert formats and composition processes. Collective and free improvisation involves risk-taking: Splitter’s endeavour of integrating up to 24 musicians takes this motto to heart. The result is a music characterised by an inherent possibility of failure.

Splitter has also always been a social experiment, questioning hierarchies of composer and interpreter, of work and event. Sonically and musically non-homogenous but still ensemble, a togetherness in difference. This is also heard in the three different pieces on “splitter musik”.

Vortex is a recording of a concert at Berlin’s silent green in November 2019. More than 30 individual tracks have been mixed so as to approximate the listening situation in the former crematorium: musicians were positioned on the balconies of the circular chapel, while the audience was seated below. What listeners of the recording can hear is Splitter in its natural habitat of collective improvisation: various noises of indeterminate origin, miniscule bird-like chirping, tendencies of Postrock cues with culminating crescendi, at other points radical breaks and quiet, drone-like passages or moments of Lynchian haunting.

Imagine Splitter - the second piece of the record - takes a more conceptual approach. During the Covid pandemic, the band had to find a different way of collaborating. As a result, Kai Fagaschinski asked all members of the ensemble to record themselves “solo”. The title of the piece carries the instructions: Imagine Splitter. What listeners hear is a synthesis of 22 musicians playing to themselves while imagining what it would sound like to play with the whole group. The piece is not only a fantastically fictitious music but also a reflection on improvisation as a whole and the group in particular. It sounds both strangely familiar and like a music that would never have happened in a live setting.

For the last piece PAS, Splitter played their first ever outside and site-specific gig in August 2020. Musicians were positioned on one side of the river Spree, on the docks of the venue Petersburg Arts Space in Berlin Moabit, while the audience was listening from the opposite side. The recording captures this unique theatrical musical event. PAS is an environmental music, a collective improvisation of the group itself and its (in)voluntary collaboration with the sounds of the surrounding: the dogs barking, boats crossing, kids laughing, beer bottles popping, water squelching, ducks singing and of course the characteristic playful searching for one another in the midst of the music.

Throughout these pieces, the 3CD release “splitter musik” takes a snapshot of the abundant and ever-shifting organism that is Splitter Orchester.

Large scale collective improvisation since 2010.

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