Upcoming Concerts in Berlin: Klangbildung 24, Bonding Sounds, Richten25 and Super Silent

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Korhan Erel

On October 4, I’ll play a concert with the amazing musicians that are Shabnam Parvaresh on clarinets/effects and Sofia Labropoulou on kanun at exploratorium’s Klangbildung 24 Festival that is also a celebration of the venue’s 20th anniversary. Check out the full program at this link! There are workshops, book launches and an exhibition besides concerts.

https://exploratorium-berlin.de/en/events/overarching-events/festival-klangbildung24/

On October 10, I’ll play two concerts in the Bonding Sounds concert series. The series is organized and curated by Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu and Merve Salgar. The Bonding Sounds Concert Series brings together sixteen improvisers from Berlin’s music scene and international Turkish musicians. The concerts, spanning two weekends on October 10, 11, 17, and 18, will take place at two Berlin venues. The concerts are free of charge.

The first concert on October 10 will be at the Alte Feuerwache in Berlin with the classical kemenche player extraordinaire Canfeza Gündüz. This will be followed by the duo of Ufuk Elik (bağlama) and Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu (cello). A third concert with all of us will end the evening. Check out the rest of the program at the link below. I’ll be there on all evenings to enjoy music performed by wonderful, mostly first-time duos.

Bonding Sounds on Digital in Berlin

On October 26, Only With You, my synth duo with Eliad Wagner will play a set at Richten25. The second set will be Eric Bauer. 

And finally, on November 1, I will play my new solo piece Spam Victim – Poems at the exciting solo concert series Super Silent for new, experimental and improvised music organized by the XJAZZ! Festival. Spam Victim – Poems is based on the contents of a series of spam emails I received over the course of 2024. My first Spam Victim album, Spam me Senseless, is available for download on my Bandcamp site:

https://korhanerel.bandcamp.com/album/spam-me-senseless-2

The second act of the evening at Emmauskirche in Kreuzberg will be the drummer extraordinaire Philo Tsoungui! I’m really looking forward to hearing Philo’s set. Philo happens to be the drummer of the amazing rock band Mars Volta, by the way. Check out the full program of the series that’ll span three days:

https://www.xjazz.net/p/SUPER-SILENT-1-5n5qBpq0S93sGLBGSvP76U

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Solo, duo and group concerts in Berlin

Posted on June 25, 2024 by Korhan Erel

On Wednesday, June 26, I’ll be playing an improvised concert with Jessica Ackerley (guitar), Eli Wallace (piano), Camila Nebbia (sax) and Cansu Tanrıkulu (voice, effects) at Sowieso. This is going to be a fun evening of first encounters for me. The only musician I’ve played with before is Cansu – in many settings as well as in our duo Pep Talk

On Saturday, June 29, I’ll be playing a structured improvisation on synthesizers at the SUBTOPIA event at Stapeltor in Duisburg. I’ll be sharing the bill with Güner Künier, Clara Levy, A2ICE & BO3 as well as Ilija Matusko (reading) and sun_ma___ & finsterNiz and ANDRAS_2020 on the decks. Here’s a newspaper feature about this one-day festival. The article is in German but who needs to know other languages nowadays when we have AI to help us out! There is a photo of me with hair in it!

The concert in Duisburg had to be postponed due to local difficulties with the European Football Championship and a very large anti-AfD demonstration that will take place in Duisburg on the day of the concert. I will announce the new date soon.

FitFot performing at Novilla, Berlin in September 2023. Photo by Asarela Orchidia Dewi

On Friday, July 5th, Fitfot, the ambient family business with the love of my life Tuçe Erel, will play at the 15th Anniversary of KOOKOO at OHM! This one is special, because it is our second concert ever and at what an event! KOOKOO, organized and curated by Mieko Suzuki and Arno Raffeiner, has been more or less the only club night we’ve been going to for the past 2 years, and we’re thrilled to be playing there on their anniversary night! Other acts and DJs of the night are: DJ DIE SOON & Rully Shabara, Maya Wada, Mieko Suzuki, Rabih Beaini, Tot Onyx, Ara

Link for more info: https://de.ra.co/events/1949768

On Wednesday, July 17th, I’ll play solo at the Experimentik series curated by Seiji Morimoto. It will be wonderful to revisit this series after many years and also to share the bill with the wonderful Antje Vowinkel as well as Lorenzo Abbatoir, whose music I’m looking very much forward to experiencing.

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Upcoming Concerts in Berlin: Mutables and Only With You Performances

Posted on May 24, 2024 by Korhan Erel

After playing two concerts on May 3rd at Istanbul’s wonderful concert venue Borusan Music House with Pep Talk and Böseblick, I stayed mostly under the radar, only going up for rehearsals and fun stuff with friends. Before my partner Tuçe Erel and I leave for Basel for a 2-week residency in Basel, Switzerland, I will play two shows in Berlin. The first one with a new project, the latter with an existing favorite of mine.

The new project has the working title “Mutables” and is the brainchild of myself, butoh dancer Min Yoon and analog live visualist Nicolas Wiese. With Mutables we have set out to tell the tale of the post-human “Mutables”, who have the unique gift of perceiving and manipulating Hierarchitons, the particles that form hierarchical relationships between humans, post-humans and non-humans. The project is in its infancy and this performance with Min and Nicolas will be mostly improvised, but based on material we have already rehearsed. We will perform at Untergrün at Lichtblick Kino on May 24th at 20:00 with the kind invitation by bassist Fyodor Stepanov.

My duo, Only With You, with synth wizard and overall cool person Eliad Wagner is going to play at Panda Platforma/Panda Theater in Berlin on May 29th. Eliad is also going to play with another duo partner, the amazing Andrea Parkins. The concert will end with an improvised trio performance. Only With You is no stranger to Panda, having played their first concert in 2024 at the Trouble in the East Records Festival on Feb 1st. Starts at 20:00

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Pep Talk and Böseblick at Istanbul Borusan Music House

Posted on April 8, 2024 by Korhan Erel

I will be bringing two bands of mine to Istanbul in May. Pep Talk, our experimental pop improvisation duo with extraordinary singer-composer Ayşe Cansu Tanrıkulu, and the electronic music quartet Böseblick with Alessandra Eramo, Kirsten Reese and Ariel Orah will play at Istanbul’s gem of a music venue Borusan Music House on May 3, 2024.

Pep Talk combines poetry, mainly from Charles Lindsay’s wonderful book Recipes for the Mind on Terranova Press, strange lyrics, beats and other elements from pop music with improvisation and composition. Cansu and I have been collaborating on several fronts since 2017 including theater music for the play Krampus at Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin (2021) and several improvised music concerts (video of our XJazz Festival pandemic concert below). This concert will be the debut concert by Pep Talk.

Böseblick is an experimental electro-acoustic quartet comprising of me and Kirsten Reese on laptop, Alessandra Eramo on voice, cassette players and effects, and Ariel Orah on electronics. It was founded right after a concert at Sowieso in August 2021 and has since played at KM28 Berlin, Klub Katarakt Festival Hamburg, Berlin School of Sound and Cashmere Radio. An excerpt from our KM28 concert cann be viewed below.

Borusan Music House has been a major supporter of “strange music” in Istanbul for over a decade and they have been very generous to me over the years. Including two concerts I played in Berlin that was co-organized by them, I will have played 13 concerts there since 2011.

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Ephemeral Fragments goes on tour!

Posted on March 7, 2024 by Korhan Erel

The improvising trio of Ephemeral Fragments was founded in 2019 in Essen, Germany and has been playing and recording since then. It consists of cellist Emily Wittbrodt, tubax player Florian Walter and me on electronics. We released our debut album “Mit Gefühl” on Umland Records in 2022. After playing various venues in Germany in the last four years, Ephemeral Fragments goes on tour in March. Actually, there will be two separate tours: one in the German State of North-Rhine Westfalia and the other in Estonia, Finland and Denmark:

The NRW tour consists of three concerts in Essen, Bochum and Cologne

09.03 Bürgermeisterhaus, Essen
10.03 Q1, Bochum
12.03 Plattform nicht dokumentierbarer Ereignisse, Cologne

On March 18, Ephemeral Fragments will hop on a ferry from the German port of Travemünde towards Tallinn to play their first out of three concerts on their Nordic / Baltic tour. The schedule is as follows:

March 20, Tallinn in the concert series Improtest at Estonian Centre of Contemporary Music
March 22, Helsinki in the concert series Suhina Klubi at Myymälä2
March 26, Copenhagen at Klub Primi

This tour is kindly supported by Goethe Institut in the framework of their funding series “Touring Green”. As the idea is to use only environment-friendly means of transportation, we will be taking two very long ferry rides from Germany to Tallinn and then from Helsinki to Stockholm, and then a train to Copenhagen. Exciting!!

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Debut with Liudmila Siewerski at Forgotten Islands

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Korhan Erel

New media artist Liudmila Siewerski and I met at Cafe Babette in October 2022 at my performance there. We stayed in contact, talked, rehearsed and will now perform at the same venue on November 16 at Forgotten Islands, an evening of audiovisual performances curated and organized by Liudmila. The evening will feature several other exciting acts:

Anne Wodtcke
Liudmila Siewerski & Sander Saarmets
Liudmila Siewerski & Korhan Erel
Stefano “Menion” Ferrari & Aconite
Aseret & Or Sarfati

Discover “Forgotten Islands”, an immersive audiovisual performance at Sudhaus, Café Babette on November 16. Unveiling entirely unique experiences, this event rekindles curiosity and artistic exploration, offering a platform for Berlin’s new media artists and international composers. Prepare to navigate uncharted territories of sensory engagement, anticipating the unexpected, and encountering a kaleidoscope of innovative sonico-visual narratives that challenge conventional boundaries. Don’t miss this memorable evening of cutting-edge multimedia technologies and artistic prowess.

Facebook Event

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7 Habits of Highly Miserable People at Audiovisionen

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Korhan Erel

On August 31, 2023, I’m going to present my 7-piece composition “7 Habits of Highly Miserable People” in its entirety at the Audiovisionen concert series curated by Hannes Teichmann at Kulturraum Zwinglikirche. Audiovisionen is one of Berlin’s prominent electronic/electro-acoustic concert series that has featured performances by Robyn Schulkowsky, Thomas Fehlmann, Mieko Suzuki, Baby Vulture, Peter Kirn and many more excellent performers and composers.

This series of pieces are inspired by a self-development article of the same name written by Tamara Star, which in turn ties in with the business guide bible “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, written by Stephen Covey. The piece creates an abstract storyline based on the 7 habits, but leaves a lot of room for one’s imagination and let’s the audience fill in the gaps, according to how they related to these habits of highly miserable people:

1. Their default belief is that life is hard.
2. They believe most people can’t be trusted.
3. They concentrate on what’s wrong in this world versus what’s right.
4. They compare themselves to others and harbor jealousy.
5. They strive to control life.
6. They consider their future with worry and fear.
7. They fill conversations with gossip and complaints.

Composition materials range from found sounds to synthesized speech to recordings of synthesized or computed sounds. The pieces consist of two parts: a tape part and live performed sounds and modulations.

Korhan Erel at be kind festival (Photo by Tuçe Erel)

The research and initial compositional phase of this work was supported by Musikfonds Neustart funds in 2022 and the first two pieces were performed at be kind festival in Berlin in October 2022, which can be heard here. Another performance of four of the pieces were at the New and Newest Music Festival in Istanbul in May 2023.

So, come and let’s be miserable together on the last day of August at the Zwinglikirche, possibly the most appropriate venue for a piece that is about the number 7 and some aspects of the human condition. The venue has a bar and will be much cooler than outside!

Tickets can be purchased here or at the door on the day of the concert. The evening starts at 20:00.

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Duo concert with Ute Wassermann on 24.07

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Korhan Erel

I have been playing with the amazing voice artist/composer Ute Wassermann on and off since our meeting on the exact day I moved to Berlin in 2014. We performed in quartets, in larger ensembles, played several duos in Berlin and Istanbul and then the pandemic happened.. We are now reviving our duo and will perform an improvised concert at Keith Bar in Berlin on Monday, July 24, 2023. Music starts around 20:00. The concert is organized and curated by musician, composer Joseph Kudirka.

Ute Wassermann, voice, bird calls, objects
Korhan Erel, synthesizer

Here’s the full recording of our duo in Istanbul in 2019. Hope to see you there!!

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Panel on Networking and Two Concerts in Berlin

Posted on July 4, 2023 by Korhan Erel

I’m going to be a panelist at “#1 Get connected! Networking in Berlin’s creative and cultural scene” event organized by Kreativ Kultur Berlin on 6.7. at 17:00 (CET). If you know people who’ve just arrived in Berlin and could use some help, please share this event with them. The event is free, but requires registration (and commitment). There will be a Q&A session after the panel as well as a speed-dating slot where participants will be able to meet each other and the panelists.

On 7.7, I will play with violist Marie Takahashi at a house concert in Berlin. Marie and I played several duo concerts in 2017 and then joined the improvising ensemble Klub Demboh together. This will be our first duo moment after 6 years. Please send an email to hannesbuder@gmail.com for the address. Doors open at 19:00, performance at 20:00

On 24.7, I will play with the amazing voice artist Ute Wassermann at Keith Bar in the concert series organized by Joseph Kudirka. This will be our first duo concert after our Istanbul concert in February 2019. The night starts at 20:00.

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Böseblick plays live on Cashmere Radio

Posted on June 17, 2023 by Korhan Erel

The electronic music ensemble Böseblick will be hosted by Nico Daleman on his show “The Rest is Music” on Cashmere Radio on June 19. The show starts at 5pm and will feature an interview with us and a live set. Tune in to Cashmere Radio on their website.

The shows archival recordings can be heard here: https://cashmereradio.com/shows/the-rest-is-music/

Böseblick are:

Alessandra Eramo, voice, tapes, theremin, effects
Korhan Erel, computer, melodica
Ariel Orah, electronics
Kirsten Reese, computer

Here’s a taste of what we do:

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