Within the project POST ELETTRONICA
curated by Valentina Gensini and Letizia Renzini

In tribute to John Cage, the project POST ELETTRONICA investigates territories of “post-electronic” experimentation revealing Cage’s contemporary inheritance and presenting artists who share a dramatic and gestural use of new technologies. Hybrid works that combine music, video, performance, sculpture, sound, noise become vocabularies of a composite language in which the management of advanced software is combined with the artifact in an attempt to dissolve the conceptual approach towards the involvement of the viewer.

Mat Pogo [Berlin/Florence] – vocals, cd-player
Ignaz Schick [Berlin] – turntable, motors, objects

Mat Pogo and Ignaz Schick met on the Berlin scene and started collaborating in August 2009. So far they have given several in the meantime legendary concerts in Berlin and also toured France, Italy and Switzerland. All meetings happened without any prior rehearsals. Both share a blind understanding for timing and composition and their music is fast moving and intense. They create a musical style which clearly refers to cut-up collage & noise music, but in contrast to earlier movements the material of choice is rather abstract and electro-acoustic.

In February 2010 they went into the studio but decided to trash all the recorded materials in favor for a live-album which they have been recording during concerts throughout the entire year of 2011. In early 2012 they also produced and recorded two subsequent nights in Berlin entitled “The Heat of the Night”. For this evenings they performed 4 contrasting suites and sets switching and fading from their Harsh Noise to the Cool Jazz of Sven-Ake Johanssonís Cool Quartett. Again it is not clear if the taped music will be released or if they prefer to stay without any official release for preserving their performance exclusively as live-experience.

Born in Rome Mat Pogo is a vocalist and graphic artist now resident in Berlin. He started his musical activities in the mid 80s as a singer in several free form rockíníroll bands as Dum Dum Power, Electric Citizens, Box of Surprises, I Tifoni, Feten7 and Minga.
In 1990 he was one of the founder members of the Burp Enterprise multimedia collective originally based in Florence. Still in full activity the collective then expanded internationally developing a musical label and publishing house called Burp Publications responsible for some of the most critically acclaimed projects from unprotected italian underground. Mat Pogo, beside his path as a spontaneist songwriter, moved from avant experimental rock to more abstract material, and in 1995, together with percussionist/DJ Roberta WJM Andreucci and reed player Edoardo Ricci, he founded Jealousy Party. Still in activity JP is one of the most advanced musical units in Italy mixing with personal touch soul, improv, avant rock, noise and error music.
His solo set features his voice, a microphone and some electronic devices. He developed his own language as a vocalist using his experience as a rock singer, an improvisor and radio artist where music, sounds, anecdotic and narrative elements fuse constantly. Weird processed vocal eruptions, intense screams, occasional words, pitched mouth cavity noises and electronic textures melting together in a very expressive way and often with a delicate sense of humor.

Ignaz Schick‘s electronic work has gone through different phases of instrumentation from simple bedroom tape collages & vinyl manipulations via md field recordings to hard & software samplers. Over the years his scepticism towards digital technology and computers has grown and in parallel has his collection of little sound making objects. “Objets trouvés” which he has used in many different musical contexts.
Within the last two years the turntable came back to interest as a simple, fast and reactive interface and it was a small but important step to leave the (own) history of sampling/plunderphonics for exploring the machine in its most direct and basic way: a rotating plate with its surface creates friction and makes objects vibrate and resonate.
An immense cosmos of sound opening up – the quality depending on material, surface, speed and the way it is amplified. Turntable as a direct sound source and not necessarily only a machine of reproduction.