(En)chanting Wood

In the garden of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, double bass player Florentin Ginot invites the audience to gather for a concert about nature in the post-Anthropocene. In this co-creative concert performance, composer Carola Bauckholt imagines the double bass as Noah’s Ark, where ants, insects, hedgehogs, and squirrels come together with forest spirits, fairies, and fireflies. In the spirit of sound ecology, she merges the double bass and electronics with the surrounding nature. Underground sounds, which she records with the help of geophones, are electronically amplified and mixed with Ginot’s virtuoso playing. Composer Lou Kilger, meanwhile, positions the contrabassist and his instrument as a physical anchoring point from which the electronics open up the surrounding space. Through the works of Bauckholt and Kilger, Ginot enters into a new relationship with his instrument, whose buzzing sounds blend with the subterranean vitality of the surroundings, enchanting the garden of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.