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OFFSCREEN TRIO
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MMichael Rataj, Jan Trojan and Ivan Boreš
Michal Rataj: live electronics/cymbal
Jan Trojan: amplified metal sheet, electronics
Ivan Boreš: acoustic/electric guitar

The OFFSCREEN TRIO showcases an emotional interaction between composition and live improvisation and has evolved from a combination of instrumental virtuosity, sound imagination and music instrument design. All are artists from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Ivan Boreš studied classical guitar with Štěpán Rak, and has also directed all kinds of experimental guitar performances and virtuosic metal music performances. Michal Rataj graduated from musicology and composition programs led by Ivan Kurz and Milan Slavický. Thanks to his interest in electronic music, he became engaged in radio and film based sound design and composition and has been discovering their relationships to classical chamber and orchestral music, as well as the contemporary improv-scene. Jan Trojan graduated from the same composition programs, his main focus being acoustic ecology within a frame of contemporary sound art. This path took him slowly into all kinds of hardware hacking, recycling and connecting the unconnectable.

ECHOFLUXX ENSEMBLE
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The Echofluxx Ensemble will present a film version of Text One by David Means’ 2016 opera "Apropos of Not That”, featuring video and soundtrack by Michael Croswell; libretto by Michael Karman, narrated by Jon Spayde; choreography by Maureen Koelsch; and photography by David Means. Next are ZoomShorts, films by Matt Manowski using materials made by the Ensemble during the pandemic, including “Zu Zebalon” (text by Georgia Stephens) and “Post Constellations Embrace 7”. Zoom performers include John Franzen, Mary Garvie, Gil Gragert, Tom Kanthak, Michael Karman, Oskar Kubica, Homer Lambrecht, David Means, and Jon Spayde. Finally they will present a tribute to our friend Michael Croswell, whose film “Instruction/Destruction” was originally scheduled to premier in May, 2020 – a fascinating and poignant journey through the images and sounds of the composer's biological systems as he undergoes cancer treatment.

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

Tuesday, November 2nd, 19:00: Ensemble Terrible with new works by Anna Vtípilová, Milica Modrá, Jan Kotyk, Timea Hvozdíková and Richard Grimm (see pgm).

Wednesday, November 3rd, OFFSCREEN TRIO with Michael Rataj, Jan Trojan and Ivan Boreš (see E21 performance); Films from KRASTI by Martin Klusák, Jan Rybář, Marek Kimei Matvija, Kvéta Přibzlová.

Thursday, November 4th, 19:00: "Rotates As It Turns", poetry by Michael Karmen, read by Dan Senn (hear E21 reading); Improviations by Andrea Ermke and Anaďs Tuerlinckx
(see E21 performance); Echofluxx Ensemble, David Means, director.
Echofluxx is a festival of new media, visual art, texts and experimental music produced by FMErá of Prague. This year it will again present international and Czech performers in a four-day festival at Paralelní Polis in Prague, May 5-8, 2020.


Dan Senn (Prague-Wisconsin)
 is an intermedia artist working in music composition, sound art, kinetic sound sculpture, experimental and documentary film. He has been a professor of music and art in the United States and Australia. Dan travels internationally as a lecturer, performer and installation artist living in Prague where he directs the Echofluxx festivals, and Watertown, Wisconsin, the USA, with his partner & collaborator, Caroline Senn. Dan's work moves freely between expressive extremes and languages depending upon the aesthetic joust at hand. He studied music (composition, French Horn, conducting) and art (ceramics) at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse with Truman Daniel Hayes, Leonard Stach and William Estes, and at the University of Illinois, Urbana (composition), with Salvatore Martirano, Ben Johnston, Otto Laske and Herbert Brün. His music is published by Smith Publications of Baltimore. "Any Three Treble Instruments In the Same Key," aka "Rivus," was released in 2015 by Ravello Records, along with works by Scotto and Cage and performed by the McCormick Percussion Group. In 2017 his work "Four Psalms Modal" was premiered by the Kuhn Choir of Prague, and later performed by the 57 voice Tesas State University Choir in 2019. "Seven for Piano" was premiered in February 2017 by Caroline Senn in Wisconsin. His feature length documentary "Voice of Theresa" will be screened in 2019 at the Indie Wisconsin Film Fest. In 2019 he toured the west coast of the United States performing new works for voice  hand-made instruments and improvised electronics. Dan founded Newsense-Intermedium of Tacoma, Washington, cofounded Cascadia Composers of Portland, Oregon, Roulette Intermedium of New York City and the Echofluxx Media Art Festivals of Prague where he serves as director. SITE
+ERMKE+TEUERLINCKX
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Andrea Ermke setup
Andrea Ermke (Austria) is a musician living in Berlin working with samples and field recordings she replays on mini disc. She is member of groups like Sink (with Chris Abrahmas, Arthur Rother and Marcello Busato) and Tree (with Burkhard Beins and Chris Abrahams). SoundCloud
Anaďs Teuerlinckx (Brussels) is a pianist, composer and sound artist from Brussels. She moved to Berlin in 2008, interested in the local improvised music scene. Tending to a rather physical and expending way of playing, her performances are characterized by a decidedly harsh and noisy but at the same time elegiac, breezy and spacious sound. She likes to get involved in public spaces proposing inside piano activism out of the concert space and also teaches improvisation within the scope of music pedagogy. SoundCloud SITE

Teuerlinckx setup

K I N D L I N G
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films collection by+
MARTIN KLUSÁK
JAN RYBÁŘ
MAREK KIMEI MATVIJA
KVÉTA PŘIBZLOVÁ
See description






K R A S T Í
KRASTÍ is a collection of four experimental film poems that seek out the relationships between internal and external landscapes. BROWN rattles, creeps, looking for beauty, landscape, gossip, karst and edges. It originated from the creative cooperation of four artists during the years 2018-19. Their aim was to explore the boundaries of film (visual) and music (sound) composition. The result is four films based on different approaches (from abstract music to documentary), which intersect in admiration for the film landscape and the distinctive musical components of each film. Rhythm and movement are more than narrative. Stories are more immersed and flickered than linearly unfolded. KRASTÍ is ideally featured as a concert, ie with live music. Musical improvisations make every performance a special event. At Echofluxx, it will be presented in four short films.

KRASTÍ je souborem čtyř experimentálních filmových básní, které hledají vztahy vnitřních a vnějších krajin. KRASTÍ chrastí, kráká, hledá krásu, krajinu, jinotaje, krasy a okraje.
Vzniklo z tvůrčí spolupráce čtyř autorů během let 2018-19. Cílem autorů bylo zkoumat hranice filmové (vizuální) a hudební (zvukové) skladby. Výsledkem jsou čtyři filmy založené na odlišných přístupech (od abstraktně hudebních až po dokumentární), které se protínají v obdivu k filmové krajině a výrazných hudebních složkách jednotlivých filmů. Více než vyprávění je KRASTÍ rytmus a pohyb. Příběhy se spíše noří a probleskují, než lineárně odvíjí. KRASTÍ je ideálně uváděno jako koncert, tedy s živým hudebním doprovodem. Hudební improvizace tak vytvářejí z každého uvedení zvláštní událost. Lze jej uvést i v podobě filmového pásma či čtyř krátkých filmů.

Producer: GPO Platform - Jakub Wagner, Martin Kohout
Květa Přibylová (Prague) is Czech filmmaker and audio documentarist. She studied documentary department at FAMU in Prague. Květa is interested in the space between documentary, experimental and scientific film. Both in film and audio she likes poetic, nonsensical approach to reality and especially paradoxes. She often use 16 mm material and with old bolex camera shoots short, poetic and experimentally tinged films. Her films have been screened at czech and foreign festivals (Doclisboa, MFDF Jihlava, AFO Olomouc, Kasseler DokFest).
Krastí film notes -
"The Land of the Raven from the Arc"
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The raven as a materialization of human qualities or as an emissary of god defecates on graves, which are being taken care of by the bereaved.  Vox populi expands on their thoughts of exterminating or at least relocating these unwanted intruders. This cinematic poem revolves around the motif of the raven and combines both documentary and imaginative filmmaking approaches. The immense landscapes after the flood, dadaist collages and ancient texts are balanced out with the mundane everyday coexistence of people and ravens at a local graveyard. Ancient cultural heritage is thus put side by side with our contemporary pragmatic society. Both worlds are connected with the ever present element of water. The water in the film runs both up and down hill, cleanses the grime, the guilt and memory, spills and dries out. The texture of 16mm film strengthens the feeling of mythical timelessness and times of gradually disappearing memories. The character of the raven changes. The black bird becomes the vessel of human imagination. It becomes the material, through which we can peer not only at it, but at ourselves as well.

Martin Klusák (Prague)
 is a composer and audiovisual artist with a portfolio of internationally premiered and performed works. He focuses on music in the context of film, multimedia, concert, and site-specific situation. Currently, as a PhD student at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, he researches visual music and possible links and crossovers between musical composition and film. His projects suceeded in a range of competitions, such as selection of Phonurgia Nova Awards 2016 in Paris, Honorable Mention at the Experimental Forum 2017 in LA. Films with his original scores have been screened at major film festivals around the world, such as the Quinzaine des réalizateurs in Cannes (Happy End, dir. Jan Saska, 2016).

Krastí film notes - "Svídna"
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The old tree resembles a grand bee hive. Secrets can be heard in it’s midst. Names of lands, rivers and ancestors can all be heard in the buzzing of the bees. It trembles with the secrets of speech. (…) It’s time flows slowly and since the dawn of ages, the breath of life has been contained in it. It lives but does not realize, that in front of it stands a man quite different from the man 100 years ago. And the man, though it is his first time in this place, has a feeling he has already been there and seen this tree before. He is sure of it, for the knowledge of paths and lands passes from man to man. How else would he recognize the oak that converses with the storm ? /Vladislav Vančura - Pictures from the History of the Czech Nation . Svídna is an intuitive reflection on the suspected archetype of mythical Czech-dom, it wanders about, searches and finds the peculiar. On one hand it celebrates the magic of the film process, connected with almost mystical, solipsistic dreaming. This dreaming is grotesquely disrupted, on the other hand, by a series of alienating and opposing moments typical for a diary-like or home-made film. Thanks to this we have a multilayered film, sometimes self-ironical and peculiar, but always playful.

Jan Rybář (Prague)
studied at the musical faculty of HAMU in Prague. Apart from composing he is also a conductor and piano player. He founded a woman’s vocal sextet Ensemble Coccinelle, specializing on both Renaissance and contemporary music. Since 2016 he has been the organiser of a cycle of concerts Music in Contexts, where he presents music permeating through different kinds of art styles (eg. film, literature, art, theatre). Jan Rybář has also composed and conducted two live orchestrated scores to two silent films from the 20s - Nosferatu and The Organist of St. Vitus. He specializes mostly in music, but he also works in the field of experimental film, focusing on working with analogue film material.
Krastí film notes -
"Rhythm of my Town"
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This film, directed by Jan Rybář, who is also a music composer, draws from the work of the early Dadaists and the genre of city symphonies. Music and film compete for the lead role through an absurd dialog. The picture sometimes serves as a graphic score, other times it is the music that retracts the picture in to unusual convolutions and spasms.
The unusual circumstances, which purposefully define traditional film editing and narration are put together in close cooperation with the musical component in the way a composer composes music. Sometimes it creates the unusual situation of watching a music composition accompanied by film.
Marek Kimei Matvija (Prague) is a Czech master of the Japanese bamboo flute shakuhachi Matvija is a performer of contemporary, improvised, and Japanese traditional ensemble and solo music. He graduated from the Centre for Audiovisual Studies of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) and studied under Czech composer and shakuhachi player Vlastislav Matoušek. Since 2009, he has studied under the tutelage of Matoušek’s teacher, Mitsuhashi Kifū. In 2017, Matvija was awarded the title nattori shihan of the Kifū-kai, shakuhachi school of Mitsuhashi Kifu, and a performance name, Kimei, 貴明. Matvija has performed throughout the Czech Republic and in Japan, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, the USA, and Portugal. He is a member of Topos Kolektiv and the artistic director of the International Shakuhachi Festival Prague.

Krastí film notes - "Habitat"
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Audiovisual poem about environmental  toxicity. Human body on the border line between visions and wasteland. A derelict space encompassed by wilderness becomes a landscape of the mind sheltering despair and spiritual detachment. In this film, Marek Kimei Matvija returns to the postindustrial periphery. Together, with cinematographer Jan Hofman and dancer Andrea Miltnerová, he revisits some of the ideas explored in the documentary essay Spaces in-Between Places (dir. Matvija & Epos 257, 2015). The film is accompanied by an electronic tape by Jakub Rataj and improvised music for Japanese and Western instruments.
Michael Croswell (Minnesota) is a composer that creates music and sonic material using electric analogue, virtual, and acoustic elements. Michael's hybrid compositions of music and sound cross over the boundries that historically define composers within our culture.
ENSEMBLE TERRIBLE
 
Petr Hora Conducting Ensemble Terrible at Echofluxx 18.
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Markéta Dominkusova: violin
Šimon Truszka: viola
Jakub Gráf: cello
Ensemble Terrible (Prague) is composed mainly of students and graduates of the Music and Dance Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. The ensemble focuses on contemporary and experimental music of the 21st Century and was introduced to Prague audiences in the autumn of 2016 at a MeetFactory concert. An important social and aesthetic concern of the group is to assist bringing new audiences together by the simple selection of the presentation space. This was the case with recent concerts at Venus in Švehlovec, Pianka Dalibor, and Paralelni Polis for last year's Echofluxx 18, an interdisciplinary art festival.  This effectively links the academic environment with related forms of contemporary art. Ensemble Terrible rejects the division of art genres as well as judgments such as "high and low art," or even "good or bad art." What may now seem terrible, in time, may become terribly beautiful. SITE
Ensemble Terrible Program (pdf)
Luminescence for cello and live electronics
by Milica Modrá (video)
Okupácia II. for violin & viola
by Timea Hvozdíková (video)
Soběpodobná melodie č. 1 for string trio & electronics in 3 movements
by Jan Kotyk (video)

ET Composers
Milica Modrá (*1999)
is Serbian composer. After graduating music high school “Stanković”, she attended the Faculty of Music in Belgrade for one year in the bachelor’s course of composition in the class of Branka Popović. The following academic year (2019/20), she enrolled at Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where she continued her composition studies with Michal Rataj. At the moment she is participating in the Erasmus student exchange in Stockholm, where she studies with Per Mĺrtensson at the Royal College of Music (KMH).
Jan Kotyk (*1999) is Czech composer interested, among others, in the topics of constructivism and microtonality. After finishing his composition studies at the Prague Conservatory with Miloš Orson Štědroň, he enrolled at Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in 2021, where he currently continues his studies with Prof. Hanuš Bartoň.
Timea Hvozdíková (*1998)
is Slovak composer. She gained her education in composition at Košice State Conservatory and Bratislava State Conservatory, later moving to the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Tímea is currently a student at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg in the class of Johannes Maria Staud. Over the past few years she has also taken part in various workshops and masterclasses with composers and conductors as Yann Robin, Francesco Filidei, Eva Reiter, Henry Fourčs, Helena Tulve, Tristan Murail, Léo Warynski and others. Her pieces were performed by numerous internationally recognized ensembles, such as Tallin Chamber Orchestra or Philharmonie de Paris.


ET Performers

Markéta Dominkusova (Prague) was born in 1995 in Hradec Králové. She started playing the violin at the age of four at the Ústí nad Orlicí Art School under the guidance of Miluš Barvínková, and from the age of seven Markéta studied at the Letohrad Art School in the class of Pavlína Balcarová. She regularly participated in the Josef Muzika competitions, the Kocian violin competition, the Telemann competition in Poznań and the ZUŠ competition, where she won the leading position. She is a graduate of courses with Prof. Bohumil Kotmel, František Novotný, Leoš Čepický, Pavel Kudelásk and Václav Hudeček. She was awarded several times at the Václav Hudeček Academy. In 2010 she received a master bow and in 2011 a master violin from the workshop of the violinist Petr Racz. She toured with Václav Hudeček in December 2011. In 2014, Markéta received an Honorable Mention at the Bravo Competition in Namur, Belgium, and was accepted to the Orchestral Academy of the Czech Philharmonic. In June 2016, Markéta graduated from the Prague Conservatory in the class of Prof. Pavel Kudelásek. She is currently a student at HAMU in the class of Prof. Pavel Kudelásek.
Šimon Truszka (Slovakia) is a violoist studying at HAMU in Prague. Click here for a YouTube video  biography presented by the artist himself.

Jakub Gráf (Prague), cellist, was born in 2001 studying at Hudební škola hl. of Prague. He is in the class of Mirko and Martin Škamp. He is the holder of prizes from the Jan Vychytil Cello Competition (several times 1st prize), from the international Heran cello competition (Ústí nad Orlicí, 1st prize 2017) and from the international competition Pro Bohemia (Ostrava, 1st prize and the title of Laureate 2017). As the holder of the 1st prize and the Absolute Winner in the Prague Chamber Philharmonic (2016), he performed as a soloist with a concert by C. Saint-Saëns under the baton of L. Svárovský.
ECHOFLUXX ENSEMBLE
PEOPLE

David Means (Minnesota),
director of the Echoffluxx Ensemble, studied architecture at the University of Illinois, where he participated in John Cage’s first Music Circus. He later pursued DMA studies in composition with Ben Johnston, Herbert Brűn, and Salvatore Martirano. Since moving to Minnesota in 1978 he’s received numerous awards, fellowships, exhibitions and commissions from New Music America (Minneapolis, Hartford, Houston), IRCAM (Paris), Documenta 9 (Kassel), and received five McKnight Composer Fellowships since 1982. In 1997 he founded the Strange Attractors Festivals of Experimental Intermedia at Metropolitan State University, where he retired in 2017 as professor emeritus of music and intermedia art. SITE
Michael Karman was born some time ago in Northern California. His youth and some of his adult life was misspent in Southern California. He went to different schools here and there and was married and divorced a few times but has three talented sons and many lovely friends, so it all works out. He also writes poetry, paints, and photographs (the three P’s). He currently lives in Sophia, Bulgaria and publishes this interesting online magazine - Asymmetry.


Randall Davidson (Minnesota),
'cellist. performs regularly in Minnesota. He performs in numerous new music ensembles and experimental music-theater productions. As composer, he has enjoyed hundreds of performances in the U.S. and Europe. His catalogue includes nearly every genre: choir, opera, orchestra, ballet/dance, oratorio, chamber, television/film, theater and jazz/wind ensemble. SITE

Oskar Kubica (Prague)
 is from northern Moravia and found his way to music through friends in this musically rich location. Later he moved to Prague where he experimented with the artist group called „Frank Lambert“. Oskar joined Echofluxx in 2015 while selling beer at the bar at Trafačka which has since been razed. A year later, for E16, he joined the Ensemble as a percussionist. Nowadays Oskar can be found jamming in obscure Prague places with ad-hoc groups of musicians. See Oskar performing at at Echofluxx 18

 Mary Garvie (St Paul)
 sings and makes fine pottery. She was a founding member of the Nobles eXperimental interMedia Group (Minnesota) and performed in several dance-theater works by Georgia Stephens (Minnesota). She has also been involved in collaborations with choreographer Maureen Koelsch, composer David Means, writers Jon Spayde and Michael Karman, and has performed with the Echofluxx Ensemble since 2016.

 Merilee Klemp (Minnesota) received a B.A. in Music Education from Augsburg College, a M.A. in Musicology from the University of Minnesota, and a D.M.A. in Oboe Performance and Literature from the Eastman School of Music. She is an active performer and recording artist in the Twin Cities, playing regularly with the MN Sinfonia and recently touring with pianist Lorie Line. She received an Artist Initiative Grant from the MN State Arts Board to produce, “The Lyrical Pickpocket” - a collection of chamber music by MN composer Eric Stokes and a Metropolitan Regional Arts Grant to perform some of this repertoire in area high schools. She currently teaches at Augsburg University and Carleton College.