City Sound Kolkata

Fri, 27.01.2023 -
Sat, 28.01.2023
5:00 PM Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata

Composed and conceived by Ignaz Schick with Dr. Subir Ray, Sukanya Chattopadhyay, Dipyokamal Mitra, Varun Desai, Ankit Malik, Debjit Mahalanobis and Somnath Roy.

The City Sound Project in Kolkata draws a sonic portrait of how the city of Kolkata sounds on several layers, putting a focus on different aspects of this dynamic town combining materials from the urban sonic environment with both its unique soundscape but also its musicians and practitioners. The berlin based sound artist and composer Ignaz Schick spent the month of April 2022 in Kolkata to explore, research and connect with the city and its musical scene. Many extensive field trips and meetings with different local musicians were conducted, many hours of field recordings, conversations and pictures collected. Inspired from this manifold archive that he compiled, Schick selected materials which are the base for different compositions, sonic structures and installative displays. This collection of materials was then revisited and followed by an intense eleven-day rehearsal and workshop which brought together seven musicians from different musical styles & backgrounds, various strategies were developed on how to make the different sonic layers of the city audible.

The upcoming durational concert will be an exciting mix of electro-acoustic music, field recordings, projections, contemporary and Indian classical music, jazz and improvisations performed by an ensemble of Kolkata based musicians.

The concert will finally be part of the website dedicated to the project.

City Sound: Kolkata is part of the ‘City Sound’ project in Kolkata, Colombo and Dhaka, which is conceptualized, initiated and co-produced by the Goethe-Institut South Asia.

The concert is open to all

Ignaz Schick is a Berlin based sound and visual artist, composer/performer, turntablist/saxophonist and a curator festivals/events. He also performs as an instrumentalist on turntables, objects, live-electronics, alto saxophone & flutes. In his youth he studied the saxophone and since his teenage days he performed in free jazz and avant rock bands. His passion and interest in multitrack tape machines, record players & effect boxes drove him to start experimenting with different electro-acoustic set-ups & sound making devices. After college he studied at the academy of fine arts in Munich & worked for several years as an assistant for the contemporary composer Josef Anton Riedl. Since 1995 he lives & works in berlin where he is an active and an integral force of the so-called "berlin nouvelle vague" and the blossoming "experimental" music scene. Along with his experimental music and performance practice, he has been making sound installations, experimental objects, visual collages, text scores, concrete poetry, graphic scores and drawings.