Concerto: Sascha Brosamer & Felix Mayer

UNCOOL - ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

The residency collaboration brings two lines of practice into a single shared setup: the zither as a domestic “Hausmusik” instrument and the gramophone as an early technology of capture and playback. Rather than treating them as references, the two musicians approach both as concrete mechanisms—systems that turn pressure, friction, timing, and material wear into sound, blurring the line between “source” and “reproduction.”

Felix Mayer works with a prepared zither extended into a hybrid instrument. Piezo contact pickups foreground structure-borne sound—micro-resonances in wood, metal, and touch —while transducers and small vibration motors feed energy back into the body, shifting tension and resonance through self-induced micro-movements. The live signal is continuously analyzed to steer these interventions. Motors and transducers also replay material generated by a live-input-triggered concatenative synthesis, so that excitation and playback are produced from the same incoming stream. The instrument’s own activity becomes both material and instruction—the wood itself registering and responding to every signal that passes through it, as objects, signal paths, and the room behave like a single coupled instrument.

Sascha Brosamer folds in a different temporality through his ongoing work with gramophones and early recording media. Drawing from an archive of early gramophone recordings, he uses Pure Data to loop and process these traces—surface noise, mechanical drift, and the grain of reproduction—treating playback as a performative force rather than a document. These archival signals are fed back onto the zither’s hardware, causing the wood to vibrate with the memory of the recordings. Placed in the same space as the zither, the archive becomes a second kind of feedback: sound returning through media and wear, set against the zither’s intimate, domestic instrumentality.

Together, they build a circulation in which excitation, reproduction, and resonance continually fold into one another. Live analysis drives motor behavior; the resulting vibrations are re-captured by contact mics to trigger a corpus of self-recorded material via concatenative recombination; and the output is fed back onto the zither’s body. What is “played” is also what is “played back”—a concert situation where instrument, machine, and archive cannot be cleanly separated, and where playback becomes a form of live performance.