Marginal Consort マージナル コンソート

About

A rare 3-hour concert by the legendary avant-garde improvisation collective Marginal Consort – their first ever appearance in Germany, in the dramatic setting of Berlin’s St. Elisabeth Kirche.

Marginal Consort is a Japanese avant-garde improvisation collective composed of sound and visual artists who were all students of Takehisa Kosugi at the radical Bigaku School of Aesthetics in Tokyo in the ’70s. Founded in 1997, the collective, which plays just one concert per year, is a reformation of the East Bionic Symphonia, a large improvisation ensemble in the spirit of Kosugi’s Group Ongaku and Taj Mahal Travellers projects. Marginal Consort's current line-up includes Kazuo Imai, Tomonao Koshikawa, Kei Shii and Masami Tada. The group also featured previously artists Yasushi Ozawa, bassist in Keiji Haino’s Fushitsusha, and Chie Mukai, from dreamy psychedelic group Che-Shizu. Marginal Consort's extended set explores forms of sound and ways of playing that never coalesce into music, but create a group dynamic of ebb and flow, exploration and fluidity.

A Marginal Consort show has a fixed start and end time, but otherwise nothing else is predetermined. All is temporary, flexible. Accidental or deliberate unison. The musicians are physically separated in the performance space like individual actors. The audience is encouraged to move around to experience different aural perspectives of their dense, kaleidoscopic and immersive performance.

“Listen with your eyes closed and individual sounds are impossible to place. Like hearing a river flowing nearby." —Alan Cummings, The Wire

This is Marginal Consort’s final performance of 2016, following a show at the St John At Hackney Church, London.

Presented by Manuela Benetton in collaboration with PAN and 3333. Supported by Initiative Neue Musik e.V.