Some sound achieve from Berlin's street and wildness. Eric Bauer and Carina Khorkhordina have been working together as a duo since early 2018. In addition to their live concert activities (extended electronics + trumpet), since 2020 they have been focusing on site-specific outdoor performances in Berlin, a selection of which is presented on this tape.
released November 2, 2023
1 recorded by Axel Dörner, August 2022
Bauer: percussion; Khorkhordina: trumpet
2 recorded by Carina Khorkhordina, May 2022
Bauer: percussion, mechanical frog; Khorkhordina: trumpet
3 recorded by Axel Dörner, February 2021
Bauer: balls, cracklebox, double wind wand bullroarer; Khorkhordina: trumpet
1-3 were originally captured as short films. They can be found on
khorkhordina.org and video sharing platorms.
4-6 recorded by Carina Khorkhordina in October 2022 at Peter Cusack's and Dagmar Šubrtová's Bornholmer Soundwalk during the Parallels Festival.
Bauer: percussion, stones, bicycle bells, cracklebox, double wind wand bullroarer; Khorkhordina: trumpet, percussion
Photo and designed by Carina Khorkhordina
Mastered by Ilia Belorukov
=========
An interview between Zhu Wenbo and Carina Khorkhordina by mail. Eric Bauer and Peter Cusack joined in some answers, too.
Zhu: I know that you were from Russia, playing trumpet and taking photographs. In 2018 you have visited China and we have played together. And I also know that Eric Bauer plays electronics but only that. Beside these I think I know very less about two of you. So the first question is, would you like to introduce yourselves?
Carina: I come from Kaliningrad, Russia, but I've lived in Berlin since 2014. I got very interested in free jazz and improvised music around 2009, in 2010 I visited some festivals (in St. Petersburg and in Nickelsdorf, Austria) and realized that I found something fundamentally meaningful and exciting (the music itself and the people who played it). I wasn't a musician at all, only a listener, I never played any instrument in my life. Then it happened that I organized some concerts in Russia for Paal Nilssen-Love, Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark and other friends. I also bought a clarinet and started playing with my close friend in Kaliningrad because I felt that in order to understand the music better I had to try it myself. I didn't have an ambition to be a musician and perform in public. Later in Berlin (I was already playing trumpet then) I regularly attended workshops with Joel Grip and Tristan Honsinger, and in 2017 Daichi Yoshikawa asked me to join the concert of the band Klub Demboh, which was my first public performance in Berlin. After that concert to my surprise and fascination different musicians kept asking me to play local gigs, so one thing was leading to another. That's also when I met Eric and he asked me to have a duo session. And yes, I still do photography which is also the background for the site-specific outdoor video pieces we made together later.
Eric: As my second name suggests (farmer) I'm from a small village in Germany, roughly between Frankfurt (Main) and Cologne, and am located in/around Berlin since 2016. I come from various music backgrounds, started as a kid with turntables, tapes and radio - then guitar, drums, later piano, mostly self taught. Daring to play solo was just in 2014, which actually was the first time I concentrated on electronics exclusively and with compositional approaches only. My practice of Improvisation got an extensive schooling in the Berlin music scene, in many ad hoc encounters, more steady formations, but also workshops with Tristan. Carina and I met in a big ad hoc ensemble of danish and berlin scene, where Tristan and Emilio Gordoa conducted each one set of the ensemble, I think after that I asked her for a session. Besides my various music backgrounds I work as a social worker, primarily in the field of autism, and studied politics, sociology and philosophy. The reason I mention this, is that I feel strongly that those fields inform my artistic work and vice versa.
Zhu: You and Eric started these site-specific out-door performances in 2020. Why did you start this project? How many events did you do til now, and how often did you do that? Is this project still going on?
Carina: Initially I wanted to do a collaboration with Axel Dörner and Burkhard Beins and it was connected to my photographic series about Berlin that I've been working on since 2016. I invited them to play outdoors in the locations where I took certain photos. In this case I wasn't going to play because to be honest, back then I didn't feel ready to perform with them in a trio. It was in 2018, we made one video where the two of them play in the forest in Berlin (it can be found on my website). Then we tried to apply for state cultural funding to continue, but we didn't get it. By 2020 I was more confident and had more experience as a musician and I also got a new digital camera which I could use for filming. In October 2020 Axel, Burkhard and I got together again and played in an abandoned swimming pool. This was the first piece, soon after that Eric and I recorded in Grunewald, a beautiful forest in the west of Berlin. There are 9 published pieces and two more are coming (filmed in two very different waterfalls).
The reason why I started doing it is that I felt the need to connect my different activities - photography and music, I didn't want to always keep them separate. For a while I wasn't happy as a photographer (it is different now, but it's been a long way), but I didn't want to abandon it and only do music. So I was trying to find ways to bring these practices together. I'm also working now on solo concepts for live performances which involve my video work or photography and playing the trumpet. The first solo performance happened just two days ago here in Berlin and I thought it worked very well.
Zhu: Could you tell us the process of a normal preparing for a site-specific event? Will you spent a long time on choosing the place or doing some test before? What kind of place will you choose? During an event, how long time will it take? And would you public the event and call for audience?
Carina: In most cases I had a location in mind that I discovered on my walks in different areas in Berlin (for the photographic series I mentioned earlier). In case of Mercedes Platz piece Eric suggested the location (which I loved). I never did any tests before. Sometimes there are 2-3 takes in slightly different positions in the same area. With the lake video it was kind of ideal, we only filmed one take of 5 minutes.
I had an idea to invite audience at some point, but it never happened. Maybe it's not the best idea in the end. It takes a while to set up the equipment and find the right way to film, adjusting a lot of details. Then everything has to be done relatively fast also because of people around and potential complaints, changing weather and things like that. There's not really much room to take care of the audience and make sure they feel comfortable. I feel it's more intimate without audience and maybe I prefer it in this case.
Getting to a location might take more than an hour. Walking around and figuring things out could be another hour. Performance itself another hour, and then getting back...
Zhu: I think I know these site-specific performance for some years. I think it is very funny and friendly to normal audience, which is different to most of the other ‘serious’ improvisation concert. How do you think about the sense of humor from it?
Carina: Humor is definitely very important in most of these pieces. Also in the duo's work (our "normal" performances on stage, too) it's quite crucial. The band I mentioned earlier, Klub Demboh, and especially working together with Tristan Honsinger (who unfortunately died recently) and Joel Grip gave me a lot of inspiration in this direction.
Zhu: I’ve also noticed that, your video has very good sound. What kind of recording and camera gears do you use? Is there someone specially focus on recording and film during your performance? And do you have some tricks on microphone setting to out-door recoding?
Carina: Thank you for the compliment! In most video pieces Axel Dörner recorded the sound. He used a pair of Neumann microphones and an older digital recording machine Nagra until last year when both of us bought the Mix-Pre recording machines from Sound Devices. They work really well. I have exactly the same Neumann microphones and together it just produces amazing sound, to my ears at least. To be honest, I don't have that much experience with recording but normally I followed my intuition and the results have been mostly good. On this tape, I recorded the Mercedes Platz piece and the Peter Cusack soundwalk piece.
My camera is actually not ideal for video. When I bought it I was confident I would never get into video, I was only interested in making photos. So I didn't even check the video specifications. There were some technical issues that I had to overcome, which led me into buying wonderful manual focus Minolta lenses from the '70s which produce amazing color.
Zhu: The side B is your performance of Peter Cusack’s piece. Maybe you do not know that Peter has visited China nearly 20 years ago (maybe 2005) and his projects in China opened the ears of some experimental music and field-recording lovers in that days. Would you like to introduce Peter’s work that you were performing?
Peter: Hi Peter speaking. Carina and Eric played during two soundwalks (not really a piece) in the Bornholmer/Pankow neighbourhood of Berlin created, together with Czech artist Dagmar Šubrtová, for the Parallels Festival in October 2022. The idea of a soundwalk is to specifically listen to the environment where you walk. These walks (entitled The New Wilderness soundwalks) focused on the sounds of three different green spaces located next to each other. One is a garden area, another a cemetery and the third, Das Nasse Dreieck, a wilder place, formally part of the Berlin Wall, almost surrounded by busy railway tracks. It is very local, used by dog walkers and neighbourhood kids plus a few homeless people. Nature is allowed to find its own way. Plants are a mix of original and invasive species and there is a good variety of wildlife, particularly birds. One hears trains, wildlife, children, dogs, wind in leaves, people’s voices and the sounds of Berlin in the distance. I asked Carina & Eric to play here as a sonic surprise for those on the walk and those passing by anyway. They played while hidden amongst trees and sometimes in the open. People really appreciated it and the way their music affected listening to the environment as a whole.
Zhu: Do you think if the site-specific permanence brought any influence to your performance/recording in room?
Carina: Absolutely. The idea of working with space and including the space in which I'm performing - through movement, actions and sound - is very present now in my concerts.
The core idea is the transformation (of the perception) of the space through the music and the transformation of the music through the space. So there is now an ongoing feedback between my outdoor site-specific performances and the "normal" concerts in the room.
