"Counterfeits, Cover-Ups & Karaoke" is composed of various tiny elements of sound or notation stolen from other peoples music. To cover up this massive theft, Adele and I try to distract your attention by offering counterfeits of familiar musical brands and making the piano sing karaoke... Will we get away with it?

Written for and played by Adele Thoma.

Recorded on 07.06.2024 by Ahmetcan Gökçeer. Mixed by Simon Bahr.

"Counterfeits, Cover-Ups & Karaoke" is composed of various tiny elements of sound or notation stolen from other peoples music. To cover up this massive theft, Adele and I try to distract your attention by offering counterfeits of familiar musical brands and making the piano sing karaoke... Will we get away with it?

Written for and played by Adele Thoma.

Recorded at ZKM Kubus, Karlsruhe, on 07.06.2024.

ZKM | Hertzlab

Ludger Brümmer (artistic director)

Dominik Kautz (project manager)

Benjamin Miller (sound director)

ZKM | Video studio

Andy Koch & Lisa Michel (camera & editing)

Max Clausen & Christina Zartmann (camera)

Dan Samuel Pariyarathu (editing installations)

"Remote Control" is an invitation for the performer to switch back and forth between performing and listening: All 49 keys of a midi-keyboard trigger sounds, projected by a midi-piano and a loudspeaker. In different parts of the piece, these mini-compositions are used as note-like musical events or are simply listened to one by one. In the latter case, the performer becomes a listener, using the midi-keyboard as a remote control for switching channels whenever she starts to be bored...

Moena Katsufuji, Keyboard

Recorded at Neue Aula, Folkwang University Essen, on 25.01.2023.

Audio Recording: Charles Deichmann, Martin Preu

"Mixtape" was composed around various snippets of existing music, trying to rethink and combine them in a fluid musical continuum. They were selected by the members of the ensemble and myself and found their way into the score – in the form of very radically transformed rhythmic and melodic fragments – as well as into the electronic beats played on the keyboard – in the form of very short and unidentifiable sonic particles. Central to the composition are notated loops: They usually include an approximate instruction for each player, e.g. "increase density", "single notes only" or "pick 1 each cycle". Events in these loops are chosen to be played or not played by each musician in each respective cycle according to the given instructions, culminating in a semi-improvised section at the end of the piece.

Aaron Wolharn, Flute

Claudia Fuller, Violin

Moena Katsufuji, Keyboard

Béla Bluche, Double Bass

Recorded at Neue Aula, Folkwang University Essen, on 25.01.2023.

Audio Recording: Charles Deichmann, Martin Preu

The piece Well-Planned Theft for stolen and synthesised sounds deals with productive piracy and looks for aesthetic potentials in the notation – in this case in itself not necessary – of electronic music. It is a stereo composition consisting mainly of sounds taken from various pop songs. These more or less short sound particles are all chosen in such a way that they do not allow any conclusion to be drawn about a specific song in terms of sound. Instead, they stand for certain sound topoi. The theft is artificial in that it is only revealed in the score – as an assertion, so to speak – but cannot be heard from the sound itself.

The initial sounds were initially described relatively precisely in a production score in the style of a bibliography. Reproducing the piece with some interpretive fuzziness would thus be possible. The temporal organisation of the sounds is then established by means of a traditional rhythm notation. The stolen sounds are augmented by some synthesis sounds.

Well-planned Theft proposes a way of notating complex electronic sounds very accurately and yet very easily by considering the entire corpus of published music as a repository of musical material that can be referenced by means of citation. Here, notation is understood less as a medium of communication and more as a compositional tool.

Well-Planned Theft was premiered at KONTAKTE Festival, Akademy of Arts Berlin, 24.09.2022.

Fabian Bentrup: Podcast mit Simon Bahr by Simon Bahr

"Scrollbar" is a short solo piece written for Javad Javadzade as part one of his project "lockdown miniatures".

improvised performance with analog hifi-mixers and computer

In No-Input-Mixing, the outputs of a mixer are connected to its inputs, creating feedback loops. Various different sounds can emerge, with different volume faders now controlling pitch, rhythm and spectral features of a sound. Fillin’ the Feedback Form confronts this wild and often unpredictabil instrument with highly organised digital algorithms that try to tame it.

This performance was done at Kunstverein Wesseling on 19.11.2020, as livestream from Antonia Grubers Solo Exhibition BIPOLAROID DISORDER.

improvised performance with analog hifi-mixers and computer

In No-Input-Mixing, the outputs of a mixer are connected to its inputs, creating feedback loops. Various different sounds can emerge, with different volume faders now controlling pitch, rhythm and spectral features of a sound. Fillin’ the Feedback Form confronts this wild and often unpredictabil instrument with highly organised digital algorithms that try to tame it.

This performance was done at Kunstverein Wesseling on 19.11.2020, as livestream from Antonia Grubers Solo Exhibition BIPOLAROID DISORDER.

Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Simon Bahr