subtle hacking

“[…]we are all connected and we love you” is the new piece by Eloain Lovis Hübner.
This radical openness to love is accompanied by works by Lula Romero, Florian Zwißler, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, and Asmus Tietchens. Pieces from different generations and origins come together as a unified whole – we call it subtle hacking.
We share a long-standing collaboration with Eloain Lovis Hübner, as all trio members have already worked with her many times. In February we recorded another piece for her portrait album in the Edition Zeitgenössische Musik, and we are very pleased now to be working with her also as a synthesizer trio. Eloain is distinguished by her wide stylistic range, her precise responsiveness to performers and audiences alike, and her own experience as a performer on synthesizers and effects. For her, electronics are an integral and natural part of the instrumental palette – an attitude that has raised the collaboration to a special level from the very beginning. The piece was created with support from initiative neue musik berlin e.V.
Lula Romero has been composing electroacoustic music since the beginning of her career and has worked in studios such as ZKM Karlsruhe and the SWR Experimentalstudio. She has a close working relationship with Martin Lorenz, which now results in a concrete collaboration with the entire trio. Lula has often heard us perform and has chosen for her piece a text by Walt Whitman, which takes a similarly queer direction as the text of Eloain’s work. Her piece was supported by the Musikfonds.
Florian Zwißler is a formative figure in Cologne’s electroacoustic music scene and himself a performer on a collection of historical analog instruments. The ensemble and Florian have known each other for many years – their collaboration is the long-awaited outcome of many conversations about electronic music and instruments. Particularly exciting for us is that Florian himself plays in a synthesizer ensemble. We are eager to experience his working process. His piece is being created with support from the NOW! Festival Essen.
The late Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, who passed away about a year ago, was present not only with his late works for acoustic instruments, but was also a pioneer of electroacoustic music. In 1977 he wrote Repetitionen for synthesizer ensemble, premiered at the ORF Musikprotokoll and not performed since. After a long search we finally received the score from his estate manager Hauke Harder. With this performance we wish to shed light on an early work, crafted more rigorously than his late output, while at the same time representing an important document of his engagement with electronic sounds.
Asmus Tietchens is the “Grand Old Man” of Hanseatic chamber electronics. Lange//Berweck//Lorenz perform recompositions of his popular early works from the album Nachtstücke (1980), as well as his piece Pseudo Topos, which he composed in 2023 for L//B//L.
Asmus Tietchens, Lula Romero, Eloain Lovis Hübner, Florian Zwißler, and Ernstalbrecht Stiebler represent a wide aesthetic spectrum. They differ in background, approach, and generation, and we perform their works with care and precision.
We deliberately include only a few pieces, so that we can take the necessary time to make even the subtleties audible. And thus, despite all their differences, a program emerges that unites everything into a whole – we call it subtle hacking.