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Darmstadt On Air #10
Visibility in electronic music

„Some people drink a glass of whisky, some people probably sniff coke, some people drink a beer, I like dressing up.“

The 10th episode of our ? Darmstadt On Air podcast is about visibility in electronic music. Sebastian Berweck is a pianist and electronic musician who gives workshops on electroacoustic performance practice at the Darmstadt Summer Course. He invited the self-taught experimental electronics improviser and sound designer Korhan Erel to be his interview partner for this podcast. They met in September 2020 in Berlin-Neukölln in Sebastian’s living room and talked about performing electronic music on stage and how to actually bring it beyond the stage and to the audience. In acoustic music, sound generation and body movement are corresponding. Electronic music is different because controller (e. g. a MIDI controller) and sound generator (e. g. the computer) are often two separate things. For Sebastian, this raises questions such as: „How do we interact with the instruments that we have? What decisions do we make by choosing these instruments and not others? How do we connect with the audience and how do we make clear that we are actually musicking and not just controlling? How do we deal with the virtually endless possibilities that electronics give us? And while we are talking about performance, we cannot leave out clothes, attitude, stage persona and the relationship with other musicians. Do we hide behind the music? And how do we present ourselves on stage?“

More about Korhan Erel: https://korhanerel.com

Many thanks to Korhan Erel and Sebastian Berweck, to Stefan Prins for the jingle, and to Olaf Mielke!

Darmstadt On Air is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

© ️Sebastian Berweck: Anika Neese; Korhan Erel: Corinna Mehl (Fuchsbau Festival)