Documentation of the concert by Jan St. Werner at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein on January 29, 2017

Jan St. Werner is an artist and musician. He became internationally known in 1993 as the co-founder of the innovative and groundbreaking electro-duo Mouse on Mars, who until today have released more than a dozen albums and gave concerts worldwide. Additionally, in 1995, Werner joined Markus Popp for the project Microstoria and performed as a solo artist under his own name as well as under the pseudonyms of Lithops, Noisemashinetapes and Neuter River. Numerous other influential releases sprang from this. In the mid-2000s, Jan St. Werner was the artistic director of the Amsterdam Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), which is dedicated to the research and development of new instruments for electronic music and digital art. Werner’s activities also extend into the visual arts, in that he creates installations and produces music for them, as well as for the works of other artists, such as Rosa Barba. In 2013, Jan St. Werner released Blaze Color Burn, which was the beginning of a series of experimental sound recordings entitled Fiepblatter Catalogue (released by Thrill Jockey Records, Chicago), followed by three further conceptual albums until 2016. At Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Jan St. Werner presents selected material from this series.

https://www.nbk.org/en/global/kontakt.html

Felder, CD, 2016

“Felder” means “fields” in German, and here the word refers to conceptual frameworks and subjects, and sound fields. Werner is a cultivator — a farmer — of the various sounds, from metal scratched on a big glass window to piano phrases found on a private Popul Vuh compilation. He mixes organic sounds from French horns and cellos seamlessly with synthesized notes created with one-of-a-kind programs. Werner builds layers of sound with differing cadences upon one another, creating intricate patterns that connect with each other structurally, rhythmically, semantically, and historically. Suggestions of jazz, industrial music, drone and even folk float in and out of the electronic compositions in a seemingly effortless manner; paradoxically, Felder was meticulously constructed over the course of four years.

Werner’s refinement process for the pieces on Felder was simultaneous with the lofty goal of challenging himself as a musician while still creating a record that is melodic and complex. Werner recorded the album in Marfa, Texas; Berlin, and around the world while touring with Mouse on Mars. Just as the album’s creation and production cannot be tied to a specific setting or time, the sounds heard on the album have no clear boundaries. They are unexpectedly malleable and mutable. Context and perceptions play with sounds to yield a fresh new experience with each listen. Samples and instrumentals bounce off one another, starting from central points and radiating outwards. With so many new sounds to discover and new inspirations to be found, Felder is an entire new field of musical possibilities — a landscape that at first appears simple and beautiful that reveals its utter complexity upon closer inspection. The album is joyful experience for both the mind and the soul.

Felder LP, CD, Download

Felder Interventions

 

 

The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) is an academic program and hub of critical art practice and discourse. Through an integrated approach to pedagogy, hosting, public event programming, and publication, ACT builds a community of artist-thinkers around the exploration of art’s complex conjunctions with culture and technology. The program’s mission is to promote leadership in critical artistic practice and deployment, developing art as a vital means of experimenting with new registers of knowledge and new modes of valuation and expression; and to continually question what an artistic research and learning environment can be and do.

Jan St. Werner’s Kinetic Speakers And Experimental Sound Creations class defines sound as an unstable art form which merges with other disciplines and yet makes strong claims for disciplinary autonomy. A critical awareness is developed of how sound art as a field for artistic exploration is performed, produced, and distributed. Students explore contemporary and historical practices that emerge outside of purely musical environments and investigate specific compositional developments of post-war modernity and electro-acoustic music, as well as non-musical disciplines related to the psychophysics of hearing and listening. Lectures, screenings, readings, and discussions with guests and faculty contribute to the development of group and individual projects.

ACT – MIT program in art, culture and technology

http://act.mit.edu/people/lecturers/jan-st-werner/

MIT sound creations blog

Kinetik Speakers And Experimental Sound Creations Magazine

MIT Sound Creations Soundcloud

poster_print_v5

Von Auditionen und anderen akustischen Wahrnehmungen, die nicht aus der materiellen Welt kommen
Hörstück von Thomas Knoefel und Jan St. Werner

SWR2 ars acustica, 2016

Komposition und Realisation: Jan St. Werner, Texte: Thomas Knoefel, Stimme: Kathleen Morgeneyer

SWR 2 studio version

Live performance featuring Matt Wand

fiepblatter catalogue on bandcamp

(Experiment of an electro-acoustic composition in commemoration of Sigmar Polke)

by Jan St. Werner and Damo Suzuki

APRIL 23 rd – JULY 5th 2015

MUSEUM ABTEIBERG MOENCHENGLADBACH

The singer Damo Suzuki, originally from Japan, was the singer of the band CAN from 1970 to 1973. He developed the improvised singing in psychedelic music, disappeared for ten years and began his own solo and network projects from 1983. Suzuki lives and works in Cologne until today. Together with Andi Toma, Jan St. Werner is the initiator of the band Band Mouse on Mars which was formed in 1993, then discovering a new connection to the avantgarde of the 1970ies and being one of the most important bands in electronic music ever since. Werner now lives and works in Berlin and operates in the most diverse musical collaborations (see Mouse on Mars: 21 again (2014)).

Beginning with Sigmar Polke’s 16mm films shown for the first time in the 1980ies, Museum Abteiberg presents in its halls an electro-acoustic concert consisting of several parts which combines Sigmar Polke’s sampled visual aesthetics, which have often been described as alchemy, with a contemporary acoustic counterpart. Damo Suzuki and Jan St. Werner present an electroacoustic composition which draws its procedures from the Krautrock and diverse form of improvisation in the 1970ies, using a range of sound materials, speech and noise, thereby presenting Polke’s process of cross-fading and multiple exposure as an acoustic procedure. Suzuki and Werner – which have never worked together before – practice an acoustic reflection which both moves within the system and makes an observation from outside at the same time. Experimenting with different materials and perspectives, this approach presents an interdisciplinary parallel to Polke: All material becomes a big picture, everything joins an alchemist mixture. Jan St. Werner: “There is no centre in this composition, the elements must be newly brought together again and again. What was just perceived and has faded is redrawn from memory and compared to the new. The image and after-image form a collage in the head as the actual composition.”

The acoustic-visual installation will subsequently be shown in parallel with the exhibition “SIGMAR POLKE Approaching Venice – Movies and Materials of the 1986 Biennale” at Museum Abteiberg until 5 July.

An edition of 6 vinyl records with hand made sleeves by Suzuki & Werner were sold on the occasion
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Städtisches Museum Abteiberg
Abteistr. 27
41061 Mönchengladbach
Tel.: 02161-252636
Fax: 02161-252659
foto credits & museum contact: Uwe Riedel riedel@museum-abteiberg.de
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Electroacoustic opera featuring Kathy Alberici, Taigen Kawabe, Markus Popp & Dylan Carlson, 2015

The central concept of Miscontinuum Album explores misconceptions of time and memory, inspired by unique acoustic phenomena derived through digital phasing and musical time stretching techniques. There is an aura of doom that pervades the work. Much of the album’s evocative nature comes from the interplay of Werner’s electronics with Alberici and Kawabe’s voices and the contrast between those organic and inorganic elements. Popp, a longtime collaborator with Werner in Microstoria, wrote the libretti, which are presented in five distinct scenes and recited redolently by Carlson. The surreal plot involves a progressive distinction of time as a force rather than a structuring system, where an individual who can shift consciously between states within that force. The high concepts and unusual creative partners combine for an album that is uncommonly emotionally resonant.

Miscontinuum was first performed as a part of Werner’s Asymmetric Studio series in Munich on June 18^th, 2013, and also featured video by Werner and Karl Kliem and stage design by Christina del Yelmo & Sonia Gomez Villar. It was broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk BR2 public radio. The striking visual elements, flowing dresses and impressionistic masses of color, make appearances on the album’s art, and will be presented in new forms in the coming months. The first revised version of Miscontinuum featuring live video by Zoya Bassi premiered at the St Luke’s Church in London on Feb 8th 2015. The second performance was shown at Volksbühne Berlin on April 5th 2015.

http://thrilljockey.com/thrill/JanSt-Werner/Miscontinuum-Album

http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=17292

http://www.volksbuehne-berlin.de/praxis/hoeren_miscontinuum/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02j3dnt

Radio Version BR2 Radio

Kunstverein Muenchen, June 18th 2013

Created by Jan St. Werner and Karl Kliem, this series of audio-visual compositions of constantly and subtly shifting antidromic sounds and images experiments visually and acoustically with Gestalt principles from the field of cognitive psychology, and triggers sensory irritation in the recipient.

Composed of 60 frames per second, the visual component of the “Rotationsstudien” uses complementary contrasts, sudden bursts of colour, and shifts from bright- to darkness to generate spatial effects that simultaneously give rise to new assemblages and undermine the viewer’s sense of reality. Same as the images, the installation’s sound component is completely digital in origin, and by means of granular resonance shifts, stereo movements, and phase changes prompts phantom perceptions. Every visitor listens to and sees a different installation. “Rotationsstudien” is a generative piece of abstract extended cinema, that runs for days without repetition.

CTM Festival 2015: http://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2015/transfer/rotationsstudien/

Rotationsstudien, Sequenzen 20—5

Experimental listening enviroment & surround sound composition by Jan St. Werner featuring Mark E Smith for Cornerhouse, Manchester

Musician Jan St. Werner has created Molocular Meditation, a bespoke light and sound enviroment with a soundtrack featuring the voice of the Fall’s Mark E Smith. Smith is heard making observations on mundane objects, events and a range of meditation techniques. His voice forms the narrative component of an abstract electroacoustic composition placed in a surreal scenario evoking a state of transformation and deceleration.

http://1995-2015.undo.net/it/mostra/183980

Klanginstallation von Jan St. Werner, 2014

“Klänge, die in den Räumen der Neuen Nationalgalerie Berlin aufgenommen und mit elektronischen Elementen versetzt wurden, dienen als Material für diese elektro-akustische Komposition. Sprache und Bewegung verbinden sich auf einer abstrakten Ebene, die Möglichkeiten konkreter und absurder Aktivitäten in einem sozialen Raum thematisiert. Die Komposition mischt sich zurück in die Realität der Ausstellungshalle und erzeugt eine akustische Parallelchoreografie, die innerhalb der Ausstellung, zusammen mit der Ausstellung, gegen die und aus der Ausstellung heraus läuft.”

The festival’s program of performances, sculptures, talks, and installations by 100 artists and contributors who have been part of the past five years of the Institut für Raumexperimente will be held in and around the exhibition “Sticks and Stones” by David Chipperfield, an intervention in dialogue with the architecture of Mies van der Rohe.

NEUE NATIONALGALERIE

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Postdamer Straße 50

10785 Berlin

https://futurenows.net/2014/

http://futurenows.net/entry/jan-st-werner/

“The piece is 36 minutes in length and draws into itself a diverse range of sounds that Jan St. Werner has recorded during his stay in Marfa along with elements recorded elsewhere but which reasserted themselves in this place. The piece manages to be site specific, but without being orthodoxly so. The train is a representative element in that it contributes a significant aspect to the town, and to the piece, because it omes from elsewhere, appears and then returns to farther away.

“So did the poet Clark Coolidge appear; and musicians Primo Carrasco, Max and John Ferguson, Scott Hawkins and David Grubbs; so, too, the various anonymous visitors to the Marfa Lights’ Viewing Station and linguist Lynette Melnar; and almost everyone, including Jan and myself. Additionally, Jan has treated the radio event as a sculptural entity, one that can be cut from time and transferred, via recording to other times and places.

“As such, the piece, which will air on Marfa Public Radio this Wednesday, is marked by the station itself, and therefore by the people of this area, but this same marking will appear again on WDR 3 German Public Radio at some point in the future and for that performance, German Public Radio will be marked by Marfa.”

Tim Johnson, KRTS Marfa Public Radio

As the title Split Animal Sculpture suggests, this piece manages to sound simultaneously biotic and fabricated. An impressionistic rendering of church bells and organ drone is suggestive of a large man-made structure, while in-between can be heard the flutters and whistles of something animated navigating it’s way through the reverberating buzz. This circling and spatial piece illustrates St. Werner’s intelligent approach to creating sound that has both weight and aerodynamic energy. This record also exists as asound installation for a single listener using headphones and one speaker.

Infinite Greyscale

Listen

Second release of the “Fiepblatter Catalogue” series on Thrill Jockey 2013

BLACK MANUAL – Brigade Commerz, CD, 2013

On “Mordendo” the dynamics of speaker compositions intertwine with concrete Afro-Brazilian sound patterns, with special “toques”, drum beat sequences also found in Samba and Candomblé… Sounds rear up, diffuse, and rhythms dissolve into tones thereby creating a “total music”.

“Black Manual” was formed in 2012 after Jan St. Werner had heard the percussionists Valdir Jovenal, Juninho Quebradeira and Leo Leandro play at a Candomblé ceremony in Berlin Kreuzberg.

Together with his colleague Andi Toma, with whom Jan St. Werner also works as “Mouse on Mars”, he mixed this unholy conglomerate of frigidly staged disorders, digital fragments, samples, broken melodies and the vibrant, tugging sub-bass caprices of the Brazilian “voodoo” rhythms – “a fala dos atabaques” (“speech of the drums”): with violence and passion as if they were trying to force the gates to transcendence open.

A performance between concert and ceremony: When the three percussionists and Jan St. Werner really cut loose, challenging and tempting each other, then worlds collide making the earth tremble! Then the black Gods of Africa are also near as if they were amusing themselves or trying to dance with the Christian hallows… “O tempo é fora do comum!” Or: “The time is out of joint!”

 

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https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/hoerspiel-und-medienkunst/artmix-galerie1160.html

https://fiepblatter.bandcamp.com/album/black-manual-mordendo

https://fiepblatter.bandcamp.com/track/black-manual-live-at-ctm-berlin-2014-1

https://fiepblatter.bandcamp.com/track/black-manual-live-at-ctm-berlin-2014-2

https://fiepblatter.bandcamp.com/track/black-manual-live-at-ctm-berlin-2014-3

A2 silk screen print of fiepblatter catalogue #2 artwork by Jan St. Werner & Rupert Smyth. Limited edition of 20, signed by Jan St. Werner.