Saturday, 13 November, 2004 - 23:00

staubgold festival

'Staubgold präsentiert: Tempo Technik Teamwork'

Josef Suchy
Aki Onda + Alan Licht
+ Staubgold Soundsystem

Joseph Suchy
"Not a rocker. Not an electronic artist. A sensual, a feeling person.
No copy-art. In these times of senseless struggles for sovereignty at
the musicians' regular table, Suchy is the cowboy with the Indian's
face."
This is what one of Germany's biggest daily newspapers recently wrote
about Joseph Suchy, "Cologne's very own professor of guitar research".
They got it spot on.
In the global improv & avantgarde community, the born Franconian is
no unknown person. He collaborated with artists like David Grubbs,
Ekkehard Ehlers, Niobe and FX Randomiz; he is a permanent member of
Burnt Friedmann's Nub Dub Players; and he was one of the founders of
Cologne-based cult-improv-label Grob. The musical sensitivity of this
slightly odd artist in his mid-forties is hard to match.
"calabi.yau" is Suchy's new solo-outing. It's a music of delicate
sounds, in which acoustic guitars and electro-acoustic signals are
woven into non-linear, fragile sound sculptures. At times, this music
borders on sensory deception (what is this sound? Electric or
acoustic?); it is an illustrated broadsheet of a strange, yet familiar
reality. Suchy cunningly and imperturbably evades the categorisations
of contemporary modern music: What he does is giving his listeners a
carte blanche to
dream. Or, as the artist himself puts it: "Music in search of the
freakwave".

discography (selected):
Smile CD (Grob, 2000)
Entskidoo (Entenpfuhl, 2001)
Canoeing Instructional CD (Whatness, 2002)

AKI ONDA

Aki Onda is a self-taught electronics musician, composer and producer,
as well as a photographer. Onda works in the field of electro-acoustic,
sound art, and improvised music.
Onda was born in Nara, Japan, on August 27, 1967. Onda was brought up
in an unusual and eccentric environment that stimulated him
artistically. His mother was a painter and his father was a university
professor and former Olympic hockey player. He studied painting,
textiles and photography from an early age, although he dropped out of
formal education. When he was around 16 years old, he started taking
photographs of musicians for magazines in Osaka and Kyoto. Through
numerous photo shoots he became acquainted with many well-known
musicians, and eventually decided to become a musician himself. He
started making music with sampler and computer, and in 1990 formed
Audio Sports in Osaka with Eye Yamatsuka and Nobukazu Takemura. After
releasing the group's first album, Onda moved to Tokyo and established
himself as a producer. He soon became a sought-after studio technician,
because of his in-depth knowledge of sound synthesis. As a result, he
was involved in nearly 100 projects in Japan while still in his
twenties. Between 1996 and '97, Onda set a base in London and started
making his solo albums "Beautiful Contradiction" and "Un Petit Tour",
which reflected his visual and poetic sensibility. Soon he released two
more albums: "Precious Moment" (2001), and "Don't Say Anything" (2002).
All four albums are personal soundscapes which he calls "radio dramas".
Each contains a different story, with or without text.
In recent years, Onda has often performed with multiple cassette
recorders and electronics, using field-recording sounds that he has
recorded himself as a diary. He started releasing the album series
"Cassette Memories" in 2003. The first of the series is entitled
"Ancient & Modern", and the second "Bon Voyage!".
Between 2000 and 2003, Onda was a visiting composer at the
Electro-Acoustic Music Studio at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, of
which composer Jon Appleton serves as director.
Along with his activities on the music scene, Onda still explores
expression through photography. In 2001 and 2002, he had two photo
exhibitions at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, which is run
by filmmaker Jonas Mekas.
Onda's critical thought and unique sensibility in understanding music
are manifest in numerous articles and reviews he has written for
Japanese magazines such as Musee and Studio Voice. Many underground
musicians and composers have been introduced in Japan through Onda's
writing and recommendation.
He has collaborated with such artists as Otomo Yoshihide, Jyoji Sawada,
Sakana Hosomi, Toshimaru Nakamura, Tujiko Noriko, Haco, Ikue Mori, Alan
Licht, Loren MazzaCane Conners, Noël Akchote, Joseph Suchy, SFT, Blixa
Bargeld, Jac Berrocal, and Linda Sharrock.
Onda currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

ALAN LICHT

Alan Licht wears many hats. Over the years, he's been a curator of
music as well as a tireless performer. And he's as well-known an author
as he is a musician. It's one thing to have eclectic tastes; it's
another to make a practice of them. Licht is as strong a
conceptual artist as he is a composer.
Experimental guitarist Alan Licht first got his start as a member of
such outfits as Blue Humans, Love Child, and Run On, as his playing
style has been likened as a combination of free jazz (Derek Bailey) and
minimalism (LaMonte Young). Since the mid-'90s, Licht has been issuing
solo albums on a regular basis (on several different record labels) --
1995's Sink the Aging Process, a whopping three releases in 1996 alone
(Two Nights, Live in New York City, and The Evan Dando of Noise), plus
1999's Rabbi Sky.