KIM Collective // Anthony Braxton’s ZIM Music // Marc Ribot

KIM Collective: The Mass of Hyphae

Creation

The KIM Collective is a fungus permeating Jazzfest Berlin. Following their performance in the Lower Stage of the Berliner Festspielhaus at Jazzfest 2018, they are seeping up through the cracks of the Festspielhaus to the Main Stage. In the carte blanche, the 13 musicians will present a varied performance of specially created compositions juxtaposed with improvisations, live multi-channel electronics, choreography, spoken and sung texts, elaborate lighting and video projection. The “Mass of Hyphae” leitmotif will consist of compositions from KIM Collective members in combination with a collage of electronically processed samples of interviews conducted throughout the duration of the festival. The performance is framed by the "Garden of Hyphae", which will develop over several days in the Foyer of the Festspielhaus.

Since 2013, the members of the KIM Collective have been working with consistency and urgency on their version of genre-spanning, de-orchestrated and inclusive improvisation and compositional music. Five years of constant KIM-led curations in Neukölln have resulted in a concert series and five festivals − a total of nearly 100 concerts with musicians from 20 countries. In 2019, KIM Collective visits Charlottenburg for the second time and continues their work in the sacred halls of high culture, presenting a mixture of relentless acoustic subversion, masks, installations and: party.

Anthony Braxton’s ZIM Music

The legendary reedist, composer, educator, and thinker Anthony Braxton – a man who’s never stopped imagining and creating new modes of expression since he joined Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1966 – leads an unusual septet in a performance of his latest compositional system, ZIM music. For decades he’s developed a dynamic platform called language music, a dozen essential categories or parameters for his compositions, and ZIM music focusses on number eleven, “gradient formings,” which in this case focusses on volume and intensity, yet within these guidelines Braxton and members of his ensemble can draw from his huge oeuvre of compositions – whether they’re part of his “Ghost Trance Music” repertoire, or his epic opera “Trillium”. The performance uses graphic scores, many of which include curved lines in a variety of colours that correspond to dynamics, timbre, and pitch. While ZIM is a relatively new addition to Braxton’s world, the dense, multi-pronged results are immediately recognisable as his handiwork, with the leader contributing lines fuelled by joy, agitation, and sorrow.

Marc Ribot featuring Dunston/Rodriguez/Taylor

The raunchy, jagged sound of guitarist Marc Ribot has been instantly recognisable over the decades in loads of disparate settings – as a sideman with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, John Zorn, and as a peripatetic leader of his own projects –, but as he has turned to improvisation-oriented contexts, his deep-seated political passion has charged his playing. In 2018 he joined forces with the likes of Steve Earle and Meshell Ndegeocello to revive a set of vintage protest songs, and with this new configuration he draws heavily upon North American folk repertoire – whether the music of the guitarist’s early mentor, Haitian composer Frantz Casséus, or the trenchant songs of Woody Guthrie – abstracting melodic shards and transforming them in charged group arrangements. At his Jazzfest Berlin debut, he will present his new quartet featuring drummer Chad Taylor, who’s worked with Ribot in essaying the music of Albert Ayler, veteran polystylistic New York reedist Jay Rodriguez (of Groove Collective fame), and the thrilling young bassist Nick Dunston.