liquid music

Liquid music is a new style of music, a meta-genre that integrates and liquefies elements of heterogeneous musical languages in order to create an open, fluid and associative space for the listener.

From a meditative and playful approach I have developed an individually very specific compositional process, which at the same time in its methodology can be taken up and appropriated collectively and easily by other composers. 

One of the central tools of Liquid Music is a very simple one: the rhythmic, vertical foundation that normally immediately determines a particular genre is simply omitted. Instead, rhythm is organized horizontally. The tension from one note to the next, within a certain harmonic space, determines the temporal progression. The precise sequence is never exactly the same, but depends on acoustics, the felt moment, and the individual sensibilities of the performers. The necessary devotion to the sound itself and its tension relationships within the musical fabric, as well as the ongoing attention to the actions and reactions of the fellow musicians, creates a strong presence in the moment. The various voices are loosely interwoven, creating a texture that might be compared to the rough brushstrokes of a modern painting or to flowing water. In this way, the ensemble, comparable to the intuitively guided brushstrokes of, for example, a Henri Matisse, can achieve great degrees of freedom and at the same time an astonishing precision and coherence in the collective. 

This methodology creates an open framework that playfully allows very different, often heterogeneous elements, from completely different musical languages and traditions, to be integrated into the musical fabric. The goal is to create an associative space that plays with our listening expectations and habits, explores genre interstices, and integrates enough empty spaces so that the musical space can always be imagined further in different directions by the active listeners. This method, which raises expectations but never fully satisfies them, allows its fragmented fragility to create a harmonic balance and striking beauty that at the same time never falls into stale clichés. 

In this respect, despite a strong visual associative power expressed by many listeners, Liquid Music is the antithesis of conventional film music. The latter does not try to break through and expand our listening habits, but exactly the opposite, purposefully makes use of our conventional listening habits in order to emotionally charge a certain film scene. 

My Liquid Music is roughly simplified between three pillars, which are not owed to any concept, but simply result from my decades of performance practice as a musician and my individual preferences: European baroque music, mainly non-European popular music and experimental musical procedures of new music. 

I also write the texts for my vocal works myself, often in different languages, depending on where they are to be located on the musical coordinate system I have marked out, in German, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian or even in Styrian dialect. 

The texts as such are artistically free, poetic creations and do not pursue a didactic purpose or a concrete political agenda. However, the cosmopolitan multilingualism and musical diversity of Liquid Music can very well be understood as an expression of a cosmopolitan, inclusive and radically democratic attitude. 

In today's highly fragmented world, I try with my art to overcome boundaries, ideological attributions and camp thinking in order to enable an experience of oneness and a sense of connectedness and being in relationship. This reflects a humanistic spiritual attitude and the conviction that we will only be able to solve the current global problems in the awareness that we are all in the same boat as one human family.