how to inhabit these different temporalities – Ensemble Extrakte

“How To Inhabit These Different Temporalities” is a flexible, archipelago-like concert installation: spread out within the space, the musicians play as if they each occupy their own island. Surrounded by metronomes and ticking timers, they transform complex improvisation instructions supplied by the audience into an immersive, constantly shifting, poetic soundscape.

The Berlin-based Ensemble Extrakte was founded in 2013 by Sandeep Bhagwati and Elke Moltrecht and is made up of musicians from China, Germany, India, Korea, Bulgaria, Syria and the USA. The group embodies of a new kind of ensemble: acknowledging that we live in a time where musical traditions have transcended all the world’s geographical, ethnic and ideological boundaries, the members of Ensemble Extrakte seek to examine the musical potential of both familiar and unfamiliar traditions. For ‘Down to Earth’ Bhagwati, Moltrecht and the oboist Cathy Milliken have developed a flexible, archipelago-like concert installation entitled “How To Inhabit These Different Temporalities”: spread out within the space, the musicians play as if they each occupy their own island. Surrounded by metronomes and ticking timers, they transform complex improvisation instructions supplied by the audience into an immersive, constantly shifting, poetic soundscape in which one may walk around, lie down, join in, listen and linger. In common with the earth’s immeasurable time dimensions – those “silent transformations” (François Jullien) that people barely understand – in this musical event it is possible to experience intuitively a small section of a vast flowing process that began long before us and whose turbulences permeate all of us in every second.

Wu Wei Sheng (Chinese mouth organ), Erhu (Chinese string instrument)
Sören Birke Duduk (Armenian wind instrument), mouth organ, mouth harp
Farhan Sabbagh Ud (Syrian mandolin instrument), Riqq (frame drum)
Deniza Popova Bulgarian and Russian folksong techniques
Ravi Srinivasan Tabla (Indian drums), Khayal (North Indian vocal style)
Gregor Schulenburg Transverse flute, Kyotaku (Japanese end-blown flute), Duduk
Lucy Zhao Pipa (Chinese mandolin instrument), Guqin (Chinese fingerboard zither)
Jieun Kang Haegeum (Korean bowed string instrument)
Hong Yoo Daegeum (Korean transverse flute), Changgu (double frame drum)
Klaus Janek double bass
Gebrüder Teichmann gramophone, musical clock
Ensemble direction Sandeep Bhagwati & Elke Moltrecht