Octopus (Cello Quartett)
Nathan Bontrager
Elisabeth Fügemann
Nora Krahl
Hugues Vincent
Duo
Sebastian Reier – Vulkangitarre
Gunnar Lettow – prep. el. bass, objctes, electronics
Elisabeth Fügemann, Nora Krahl, Hugues Vincent and Nathan Bontrager met in March 2013. they came together to improvise in Cologne. Four cellists who had never played as a group before. One might expect a homogeneous, ego-driven mess of sound. As it turned out, we’re all pretty generous people and something very special happened that evening. So, in a quite organic way:
OCTOPUS WAS BORN
Why Octopus?
First: animals are, in general, cool. I mean, have you ever seen an Octopus maneuvering across the ocean floor, curling and slinging his eight arms with impressive virtuosity? And how does that make us an Octopus? Perhaps it’s obvious: we have eight arms, too, but FOUR brains.
Like some sort of musical Voltron, however, these arms come from different places with different backgrounds. One arm plays jazz, one plays Bach, another Boulez… but they all improvise and they all listen and work together.
So there’s a lot of weird stuff happening in the Octopus brain: Clashes… discussions… unexpected deviations of thought… with 8-armed dreams leading him to amazing, unexpected paths through the unknown territories of the deep sea.
Octopus is flexible and free and therefore loves to improvise while swimming alone, but he is also open, generous and kind which means he likes working with other artistic creatures.
Sebastian Reier, born in bad windsheim, germany. co-runs the music publishing company edition stora and directs the nneon label. works as improvising guitar player since 2000, regular collaborators include sascha demand, noël akchoté, john hegre, teppei ozawa, andrew sharpley. he also played with the band stockheinz karlhausen, ernst reijseger and verdammt viel others. further activities include djing [as booty carrell] as well as production, curation [nuit blanche paris 02 | festival I.D.E.A.L. nantes 04 | festival garage stralsund 04] and writing for austria’s music publication skug as well as for the online appearance of german weekly newspaper die zeit. reier is member of the board of rockcity, hamburgs music association.
Gunnar Lettow erweitert den Klang des E-Basses durch unterschiedliche Präparationen wie z.B. Spieße, Klammern und Pinsel sowie den Einsatz von Effektgeräten. Aktuelle Projekte die Duos mit Gary Rouzer (Alexandria, USA) und Korhan Erel (Laptop, Istanbul), sowie mit Robert Klammer (electronics, Hamburg). Er spielt regelmässig in ad-hoc-Besetzungen (u.a. mit Ernesto Rodrigues, Hermann Müntzing, Carl-Ludwig Hübsch, Nicolas Wiese, Ofer Bymel). Seit 2010 organisiert die Konzertreihe Frequenzgänge für improvisierte und experimentelle Musik in Hamburg,
Frequenzgänge 