By Eyal Hareuveni
Michael Vorfeld is a Berlin-based musician, improviser, visual artist, and
sound artist who plays percussion, self-designed stringed instruments, and
light bulbs, often focusing on the use of light and architecture, and working
with photography and film. The combination of these instruments, along with
his unusual playing techniques and an exceptional variety of sounds.
Sawt Out – Fake Live in America (Self-Released, 2025)
Sawt Out (a word play, as sawt – صوت – means voice or urban music in Arabic)
is the Berlin-based experimental, free improvising trio of Lebanese trumpeter
(and visual artist and cartoon author, who designed the cover artwork) Mazen
Kerbaj and German percussionists Burkhard Beins and Vorfeld (who is also a
visual artist), both of them protagonists of the Berlin Echtzeitmusik, who
have been working together in various formations. This trio was founded in
2015, soon after Kerbaj relocated to Berlin, and
Fake Live in America is its fourth album, recorded live at eleven
concerts in June 2023, from the East Coast through the Midwest to the northern
West Coast of the United States.
Sawt Out’s three gentlemen have their own idiosyncratic approaches to their
acoustic instruments. Kerbaj employs the trumpet as a modular metal machine
that transfers air, almost never in a conventional manner. Often it rests
between his legs while he blows into a plastic hose connected into its
mouthpiece, and, obviously, uses extended breathing techniques. Beins and
Vorfeld do magic with skins and metal surfaces, and add to their arsenal
self-designed string instruments, balloons, light bulbs, and walkie-talkies.
Often, the trio blurs or blends the sonic origins of each instrument.
Fake Live in America is a collage of three extended pieces, made in
distinct spaces with different acoustics and different recording qualities,
ranging from detailed miking to plain smartphone recordings, mixed and edited
by Beins. But this supposedly fake, live sonic collage does not attempt to
camouflage Sawt Out’s process of music-making. It distills perfectly the
restless and obscure but imaginative ways which the rich, radical, and
subversive sound worlds of Kerbaj, Veins, and Vorfeld collide, resonate, and
interact. These gifted improvisers sound like different lobes of a greater
sonic organism that is experiencing an insightful and visceral psychedelic
trip, totally possessed by its powerful and intense music. Sawt Out
articulates its enigmatic, thought-provoking textures with captivating
playfulness, and great precision and focus on detail.
Michael Vorfeld – Glühlampenmusik (Karlrecords, 2025)
Glühlampenmusic (Light Bulb Music) celebrates Vorfeld’s 20th anniversary of
his unique, adventurous sonic explorations, first performed publicly under the
same title in the Labor Sonor series at Kule in Berlin in January 2005, and
later documented on the album Light Bulb Music (Easy Discs, 2009). The ten
short pieces were composed, performed and recorded by Vorfeld in Berlin in
2024. The album is released as a limited edition of 100 numbered cassettes
plus a download option.
Vorfeld has been experimenting since the mid-1980s with a multiplicity of
partly site-specific light works (most of which also included sound) as a
unique combination of electro-acoustic and audio-visual performance. He
researched the interplay of light and sound, with various light bulbs, analog
light-controlling devices, electrical circuits, and many microphones and
pickups to “eavesdrop” into the acoustic potential of the various light
events, including the light intensity, and rhythmic variety of the flickering
and pulsing lights. Glühlampenmusic suggests how light bulbs can articulate
complex dance-like moves with almost “clubby” pulsations, noisy and sparse but
mysterious abstractionism, industrial-like textures, and imaginative, hypnotic
cinematic ideas.