10 Years of Musikfonds

Like the other five federal cultural funds, the Musikfonds is an independent, civil society-based and grassroots democratic organisation. Since 2016, it has been supporting contemporary, avant-garde music in all its stylistic diversity across the whole of Germany. Over the past ten years, the Musikfonds has developed into one of the most important partners of the independent contemporary music scene. This independent scene is under enormous pressure: rapidly rising living costs, a overheated housing market, general uncertainty caused by crises and wars – and all this in a political climate in which it is more important than ever to strengthen independent culture. For artistic freedom facilitates processes of negotiation. It allows social utopias to be explored and important debates to be initiated. Experimental music, in particular, invites us to engage with the unknown, to tolerate ambivalence and to listen to one another.

The programme

Mariá Portugal’s improvised solo sets possess an urgency that cannot be explained by her intricately woven drumming and lyrical vocals alone. The music of this trained composer explores the spaces between song traditions and free improvisation. Using only her voice and percussion, Portugal invites her audience to immerse themselves with her in this in-between world. The contemporary music ensemble Broken Frames Syndicate has developed sound sculptures made of plastic in collaboration with the artist Paul Pape. The musicians use their self-built instruments as tools in a laboratory for experimental sounds and interdisciplinary collaboration. Their project RIFF fuses sculpture and sound into living structures full of movement and surprising sounds. Crutches, hailing from Leipzig and Berlin, shift seamlessly from primitivism to virtuosity and back again. This band is a maelstrom of humour, brutality, countless time signatures and an endless array of references. Their highly complex arrangements, performed with punk-inspired nonchalance, are bewildering, overwhelming and marvellous – all at the same time.

In the stairwell of the Betonhalle, the audience will experience a sound intervention by the collective Dynamische Akustische Forschung (DAF). DAF works on nomadic sound installations in urban spaces and performative situations in which listening, space and social relationships are explored collectively.

The music theatre piece *ETERNAL DAWN* by composer Alexander Schubert can be experienced as a video recording in the cinema auditorium at Silent Green. Schubert developed the piece together with the Decoder Ensemble and an interdisciplinary team from the worlds of art and science. ETERNAL DAWN explores the ambivalent theme of transhumanism. In a futuristic setting, the performers act as a group of individual cyborgs, aided by technical body extensions, biomodifications and sensors.

Programme schedule:

• 18:30 Main stage: Mariá Portugal, solo drums and voice (improvisation)
• 18:50 Main stage: Introduction by the Executive Board
• Opening remarks by Maria Bering (Deputy Head of Office at the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media)
• Opening remarks by Ottilie Klein (Spokesperson on Cultural Policy for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag)
• Opening remarks by Martin Rabanus (Spokesperson on Cultural Policy for the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag)
• 19:20 Concrete Hall: Broken Frames Syndicate (sound sculptures distributed throughout the space, activated live)
• 19:50 Side stage: Federal Cultural Fund panel
• 20:40 Main stage: Crutches (live, experimental jazz)
• 21:00 Foyer: DJ (tbc)
• 10.00 pm: End

Installations:

• Lower foyer: 10 Years of the Music Fund, commissioned video work, Dafne Narvaez Berlfein
• Staircase to the concrete hall: Sound intervention, DAF collective
• Cinema: Eternal Dawn, Alexander Schubert