Reanimation Orchestra

From October 2017 to July 2019 we ran a monthly concert series entitled Work in Progress at Cafe Wendel (Berlin-Kreuzberg), allowing us to present new ideas in a setting which combines a public rehearsal with an informal concert. In addition, we have performed monthly Reanimation Visits concerts at venues across Berlin, including Spektrum Berlin, Petersburg Art Space, Hošek Contemporary, Kühlspot Social Club, Greenhouse and Loophole.

Our 2020 series of six concerts titled Reanimation Visits, taking place at Au Topsi Pohl and Petersburg Art Space, was supported by the Berliner Senat through initiative neue musik Berlin. Although the series was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, we nevertheless managed to perform three concerts to a live audience, and documented the compositions created for these concerts in a studio recording, released on Bandcamp in early 2021.
In 2022, we were the grateful recipients of the Förderung für Ensembles und Bands FEB-II Stipendium from Musikfonds e.V., that helped us to develop our practice further regardless of the limitations put on our activity by the pandemic.

​

The Reanimation Orchestra is currently formed by eight Berlin-based musicians: Ame Zek (prepared guitar, modular synthesizer), JD Zazie (turntables, cdjs), Ingólfur Vilhjálmsson (bass and contrabass clarinets), Marie Takahashi (viola), Jack Adler-McKean (tuba, other brass instruments), Caroline Cecilia Tallone (prepared hurdy hurdy), Guilherme Rodrigues (violoncello) and Elo Masing (violin).
In previous seasons, members have included Ulrike Brand (violoncello), Adam Goodwin (double bass), Hui-Chun Lin (violoncello), Erik Drescher (flute), Sylvia Hinz (recorders) and Jeremy Woodruff (flutes), with whom we continue to work regularly. Other guests we have collaborated with in recent years include Nina Guo (voice), Matthew Conley (trumpet), Benjamin Flesser (modular synthesiser), Coline Quintin (dance), Kriton Beyer (daxophone), Jesse Ronneau (violoncello) and Haukur Þór Harðarson (trombone).

​

We have explored various modalities of collaboration, shifting from working with compositions from two members in 2017/18 (Jeremy Woodruff and Elo Masing) to a fully decentralised approach in the following season, where each member was allocated one month (one Work in Progress and one Reanimation Visits concert) to work on their ideas with the rest of the orchestra.
For the 2019/20 season we selected three members of the orchestra—Jack Adler-McKean, JD Zazie and Elo Masing—to devise structures for improvisation and interpretation for the ensemble. These techniques encouraged a deeper level of interaction between performers on stage in a way that allowed a level of playfulness and freedom within a precise framework, explored relational possibilities between the players within rigid time based structures, and allowed close focus on certain aspects of timing and memory.
In 2022 we decentralized the institution of the composer and explored the possibilities of collective composition. Three new works were developed, each composed by two or more ensemble members and performed and recorded by all ensemble members. The three works were based on concepts developed during our 2020 season that sought inspiration from different phenomena, such as technology, the natural world, and seminal open-score works from twentieth-century composers.This continuous experimentation has allowed us to establish our group sound and modes of interaction, as well as the core concepts that we employ in our artistic pursuits.

In 2023, to expand our scope and explore new uncharted territories, we plan to realise a 4-concert series Reanimation Meets Voice, that explores the human voice as an additional instrument to our line-up, capable of bringing out untapped resources from the ensemble. We will investigate various ways instruments can relate to the human voice, including but not limited to the use of electronics to blend the vocals to the instrumental sound, as well as different ways of using the voice, including but not limited to singing, Sprechgesang, reciting. In order to facilitate the process, we will collectively create open scores for the ensemble to find different ways to connect our sound timbrally and formally with the voice. We have chosen 4 different vocal performers to appear as guests with our ensemble, one for each concert, all embodying different ways to use the human voice - singer-songwriter and poet David Hull, vocal performer, poet and performance artist Lorena Izquierdo, experimental vocal performer Vi Khanh Chau and vocal performer and poet Mat Pogo.