Splitter Orchester receives FEB-4 funding from Musikfonds
As one of only 18 ensembles selected nationwide, the Berlin based Splitter Orchester receives a two-year grant from the FEB-4 funding program of Musikfonds. The funding will secure the orchestra’s ongoing collective work for the near future. For the musicians, this means a reliable prospect of being able to continue their collaboration that has existed for almost 15 years.
In addition to fees for ongoing rehearsal work, the funding covers expenses for rehearsal spaces and structural costs, as well as allowing Splitter Orchester to continue to pursue its interdisciplinary focus. Part of the funding is earmarked for inviting experts from orther disciplines (including sociology and microbiology) with whom the ensemble wants to engage in an open artistic exchange about possible points of overlap in their respective work.
As a decentralized and freely organized orchestra that questions established hierarchies in its way of working and develops its music in a self-determined manner outside of institutionalized structures, the funding approval from Musikfonds is an enormous validation.
As a large-scale, collectively improvising ensemble, Splitter Orchester has no artistic director and organizes itself democratically from within. Founded in Berlin in 2010, the orchestra is a unique collective of composer-performers with diverse backgrounds in Echtzeitmusik, free improvisation and various forms of contemporary and experimental music. The band retains a driving inner dynamic that continuously generates new concert formats and approaches for collective compositional processes, while maintaining an almost unchanged line-up since the beginning and highly valuing long-term collaboration. Collective free improvisation involves a high willingness to take risks; failure is always an option. In a global atmosphere that is increasingly characterized by polarization and the formation of binary oppositions, Splitter Orchester stands as a model for a plural, polyphonic, sometimes contradictory but inherently solidary idea of society.
+++ Release on Hyperdelia 2024: splitter musik +++
On April 19, 2024, splitter musik was the first release by Splitter Orchester to exclusively feature the collective’s own music. While prior releases have focused on collaborations – with George Lewis, Felix Kubin and the quartet The Pitch, respectively – the entire musical spectrum of Splitter Orchester can now be experienced for the first time on 3 CDs.
Vortex was recorded in November 2019 in the domed hall of silent green in Berlin. More than 30 individual audio tracks were mixed for the release in a way to reproduce the listening situation in the former crematorium as closely as possible. During the concert, the musicians were spread out on the balconies of the circular room, while the audience was seated at ground level. The recording is a document of Splitter Orchester in its natural habitat of collective improvisation – noise passages alternate with post-rock borrowings, radical breaks and quiet, droned out soundscapes.
The second track – Imagine Splitter – was realized as a conceptual piece during the lockdown in the pandemic, when the orchestra had to nd other ways of working together. It has never been played live and sounds strangely familiar on the one hand, but like no music that would ever come out of a concert on the other.
Finally, PAS is named after the location of its performance, Petersburg Art Space in Berlin Moabit. Splitter Orchester played its rst site-speci c outdoor concert installation there in August 2020. The orchestra was set up in a line of over 100 meters on one bank of the Spree, while the audience gathered on the opposite bank. The recording captures the unique scenic concert and depicts an »environmental music« that lives and breathes largely through the (un)voluntary acoustic contributions of the surroundings: the barking of passing dogs, passing boats, laughing children, snatches of conversation and the diverse sounds of the Spree’s water become an elementary part of the music.
The 3 CD box splitter musik has been released by the Berlin label Hyperdelia.
