Reanimation Orchestra
The Reanimation Orchestra is a flexible group of musicians united by their desire to blur the boundaries between the roles of composer, interpreter and improviser. Through our work over the last four seasons, we have investigated what these roles mean to each of us, and enquired as to how we can fulfil them with openness, artistic integrity, and authenticity, both as a group and at an individual level. We present our work through a diverse range of sonic resources, encompassing string, woodwind and brass instruments, as well as live and pre-recorded electronics.
Our Biography
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 received the Musikfonds FEB-II Stipendium for the project Reanimation Composes, and our 2023 season of concerts at Jugendwiderstandsmuseum/Galiläakirche was supported by Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.
The Reanimation Orchestra is formed of eight Berlin-based musicians: Ame Zek (electronics, prepared guitar), JD Zazie (turntable, 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), Haukur Þór Harðarson (trombone), David Hull (voice), and Mat Pogo (voice).
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 the 2022 season, the ensemble fully decentralized the institution of the composer and explored the possibilities of collective composition. We developed three new works, each composed by two or three ensemble members and performed by a cast of six musicians in our Reanimation Composes series at Petersburg Art Space. The three works were based on concepts developed during our 2020 season that sought inspiration from different phenomena: technology, following JD Zazie’s: Solchi Chiusi; the natural world, following Elo Masing’s bird music for trees ii, and seminal open-score works from twentieth-century composers, following Jack Adler-McKean’s Listen, React, Imagine (Hommage à Karlheinz Stockhausen).
In 2023, we expanded our scope and explored the human voice as an additional instrument to our line-up, capable of bringing out untapped resources from the ensemble in a series of two concerts titled Reanimation Meets Voice. We investigated 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 Lautpoesie, Sprechgesang, reciting. We chose two different vocal performers to appear as guests with our ensemble, one for each concert, embodying different ways to use the human voice - singer-songwriter / poet David Hull, and singer, improviser, vocal performer Mat Pogo.
As a relatively large but decentralized group of musicians, we have always placed importance on finding sustainable ways of working together. We have often kept a flexible instrumentation for the ease of finding an optimal amount of rehearsal time, maximizing performance opportunities, and retaining spontaneity in our methods of operation.
This continuous experimentation has allowed us to establish our group sound, as well as the core concepts that we employ in our artistic pursuits.