Hans Koch, reeds
Florian Stoffner, guitar
doors at 8pm | show at 8:30
Hans Koch, one of High Zero Festival’s favorite reed players, returns to Baltimore with Florian Stoffner for a night of inventive misuse of traditional instruments.
Hans Koch has quit his career as a recognized classical clarinetist to become one of the most innovative improvising reed-players in Europe. He has been working with everyone from Cecil Taylor to Fred Frith since the eighties.
As a composer he has shaped the sound of Koch-Schütz-Studer since the beginning as well as working for radio-plays and film. Since the nineties he has been working with electronics as an extension of the saxes/clarinets as well as with sampling/sequencing/Laptop. As a reed-player he is always working on his very own vocabulary and sound, which makes him a very unique voice on the actual scene.
Flo Stoffner is unmistakable and unique in his way of playing the guitar. A deconstruction of guitar playing, which has been called “a kind of autopsy of the guitar sound”. Solo or in collaboration with musicians such as Paul Lovens, Rudi Mahall, Albert Cirera, Lionel Friedli, Jason Kahn, John Butcher, Chris Corsano or Hans Koch, but also the spoken-word artist Anna Frey, he has become one of the outstanding figures of the European improvisation scene.
As forward-looking as he is backward-looking, he holds the banner of instant composing high and proves again and again how lively, surprising and up to date the tradition of free improvisation is today.
photo credit: Cristina Marx (Florian, left).
