Unsettling Sounds

For eleven years now, the Trickster Orchestra has been translating the cultural richness that Germany gained through migration into a multiplication of musical potentials and creative expression in contemporary music. The DNA of the ensemble is the diversity of its members and the global breadth of the traditions that are represented and entangled here. At the same time, however, multi-perspectivity and post-migrant identities are under growing threat. The degradation of migration, complex biographies, and a pluralistic, open society can be seen before our eyes every day, particularly after the »remigration plans« became public.

In recent months, these circumstances have prompted many members of the Trickster Orchestra to musically reflect upon this present and to combine New Music with a political approach to societal conditions. UNSETTLING SOUNDS aims to create a space for these deeply felt insecurities and explore them musically: How can trans-traditional, improvised music mediate between speechlessness and the ability to speak amid conflict and division? How can it become an expression of the insecurity of those spoken about and being judged? And how can it strengthen hopeful signs and affected people: those who stand up in solidarity against exclusion and dehumanization as well as those who will gain new access to our society through the reform of Germany’s immigration law in June 2024?

Through improvisation, contemporary poetry, and a transcultural wealth of languages and timbres, the Trickster Orchestra, which was recently honoured by being accepted into the German government's »Excellent Orchestra Landscape Germany«, marks the threats to post-migrant, diverse life and multi-perspectival thinking in Germany. The performance on the grounds of the former AEG in Oberschöneweide uses the paradigm of unsettledness to formulate a spatial-acoustic intervention that calls for post-migrant life to be better heard, present, and recognized.