ROBYN SCHULKOWSKY & GEBRÜDER TEICHMANN

Robyn Schulkowsky: Percussion
Andi & Hannes Teichmann: Live Electronic, Sampling, Processing

Look how time bends before your eyes – because that is what Robyn Schulkowsky and Andi and Hannes Teichmann do with their music. They bend time. They make a ring out of it or some sort of elipse, and then they pull it straight again, they transform it into a rope, and then, of course, they balance on it, forwards, backwards, half speed, double speed. The sounds and beats and noises seem to seek independency, they separate themselves from their origin and dance with their own shadows. The two brothers Teichmann catch sounds, create sounds, echo them, copy them, delay them, sample them, they lift them up and they let them down – and a „pitch“ like that can tell a whole story. There are fragments and there are loops, and all this creates a net, but the net is not just a web of echoes and mirrors: it vibrates in itself, it creates its own reality – so that Robyns sounds and rhythms and this architecture of electricity and zeros and ones become inseparably one thing, one body. (Text by Roland Schimmelpfennig)

Robyn Schulkowsky and Gebrüder Teichmann weave interactive acoustic webs of percussion, sound objects and live electronics. Their focus is on exploring rhythmic relations and their textures.
Which parameters can be made playable? Which actions and reactions can be linked? How can spatial and temporal distances become musically related?
Their performances are immersive, not in a virtual sense, but in an original physical sensory sense, as an engagement with acoustic and social space.
In doing so, they achieve something special: a synchronicity of playfulness, concentration and reflection.
When Robyn and the Teichmann Brothers met through a mutual friend they knew nothing about each other. Andi & Hannes had no idea that Robyn was a legendary percussionist. They knew nothing about her collaborations and friendships with John Cage, Morton Feldmann or Christian Wolff, about her live sonic sculptures for New York’s Central Station or the two weeks percussion concert she initiated for Expo2000 with drummers from all over the world. Robyn didn’t know the brothers either. Their penchant for unconventional approaches of making electronic music, their cross-traditional projects in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya or Central Asia or their collaborations with Staatsoper Berlin, Ensemble Modern or Goethe-Institutes around the Globe.
Completely without their references or any prior knowledge, the three immediately understood each other: they shared a passionate enthusiasm for discussing music and society and possibilities of equal participation.
It quickly became clear to them that they wanted to continue these dialogues in a different language: music.