Especially formed for the festival Swiss Music Days 2015, this duo of two leading figures of the Swiss and Slovenian experimental music scene promises an unique blend of improvised music. With a certain fair for inventiveness, a rich palette of sounds and ideas and an energetic, somatic approach to sound performance this makes an action-packed duo that is not to be missed.
Jonas Kocher (CH)
The Swiss sound artist, accordionist, improvisor and composer Jonas Kocher was born in 1977 and
studied a.o. with Teodoro Anzellotti and Georges Aperghis. His interest in different artistic fields bring him to collaborate with different personalities from various backgrounds and in numerous artistic and social contexts. His work explores the process of listening, the space and the perception. As an accordionist he plays the instrument within physicality and reduction, uncontrolled playing and high precision. His regular partners are Burkhard Beins, Jacques Demierre, Axel Dörner, Alfredo Costa-Monteiro, Michel Doneda, Hans Koch, Radu Malfatti, Stefan Thut, a.o. Since 2010, extended tour activity in Europe, US, Japan and Russia. As a sound artist he realizes projects which are situated between composed theatre, installation and concert pieces. His work as accordion player is documented on more than 15 recordings and on
labels such Another Timbre, Potlatch, Bocian Records, Creative Sources, Insubordinations, etc.
Irena Tomažin
Irena Tomažin is a dancer, choreographer and a singer, who mainly performs in the context of dance-theater and vocal performances, as well as concerts of experimental improvised music. So far, she has created seven vocal-dance projects (Hitchcock’s metamorphoses with composer Mitja Reichenberg, Caprice, Caprice (re)lapsed, as a rain drop into the mouth of silence, Ptih with Hanna Preuss, Out of discord with Josephine Evrard and Taste of silence) and worked with many choreographers, theatre directors and musicians in Slovenia and abroad. Since 2006 she has been working on the solo project named »iT« for voice and voice recorders, of which she made her CD Crying games. This year she did her audiovisual installation piece Faces of Voices. With iT or as a vocal improviser in experimental and improvised music she performed also abroad and in Slovenia on festivals like Rdeče Zore/Red Dawns, Break, Sound Explicit– Gallery P74, Druga Godba, Sajeta, Sound Disobedience /Ljubljana, ULTRA HANG /Budapest, Mostogradnja/Bratislava and Mostar; Club 5, Studio Amann/ Wien; Dis-patch/Belgrade, CultureScapes / Swiss, Densites/France… She collaborated in Aldo Ivančič’s Bast Collective and performs in band Borghesia and has played with musicians: Tomaž Grom, Bratko Bibič, Christof Kurzmann, Tim Blechmann, Okkyung Lee, Lee Patterson, Xavier Charles, Seijiro Murayama, Tetsuya Umeda, Liz Allbee, Christian Kesten… She regularly teaches voice workshops in Slovenia and abroad.
Swiss Music Days 2015
Second edition of a festival dedicated to contemporary creative music and sonic exchanges with Swiss musicians and musicians from Ex-Yugoslavia. A bunch of concerts and workshops ranging from jazz to avant-garde, including premiers and many collaborations. The main city of the festival is Belgrade, with concerts also in different cities of the South-East Europe region: Ljubljana, Zagreb, Novi Sad, Skopje, Tirana and Priština.
Full program online here: www.swissmusicdays.org
Partners: Pro Helvetia, SUISA Foundation, Foudation Nicati-de Luze, Canton of Luzerne, City Of Berne, Canton of Bern, City of Biel/Bienne
The project was developed within the ARTECITYA network, devoted to artistic and technological innovations with the aim of improving the quality of life in cities and is co-financed by the Creative Europe.
