lurking and working

[K9 Kai Niggemann]

Hi gang,

I have been a bit silent lately, lurking and mainly been busy doing a  
lot of different projects -- let me tell you a bit about them:

First off was a theater production with a group of people who have all  
gone through some sort of a psychosis. Two professional directors have  
worked with them (they work with them since 13 years) and produced a  
great and intense play. I made some noises, loops and created a long  
intro music for the opening scene of that play.
It opened on the 29th and was well received, I actually got fan-mail  
for the music, too...;)

Then came a project called Klangsport ("soundsports") where we worked  
with 20 or so people in a huge sports hall (amazing reverb), we  
arranged them and choreographed everything so that rhythms and music  
came from it. I set up Microphones (4x Røde NT5, 3x wireless  
Sennheisers ), piezos (Conrad, DIY), speakers (4x Mackie C300) and a  
mobile speaker (behringer was the only thing we could find and  
afford), but at least 70% of the piece was acoustic. A flutist and a  
bassplayer played all five shows as well as a guest performer, someone  
else every night: an accordeon player, a viola player (from the Bochum  
symphony orchestra, excellent!), a dancer, a trombone player and a  
tuba player.
This was also well received, two out of five shows sold out (100  
seats), the others were about 50% full.

Currently I am working on a one-person play, called "Die  
Eröffnung" (The Opening, unrelated to the Cassavetes film) where the  
music plays a major role in the mood of the play. The actor talks  
about what it is like to be an actor -- he struggles with his life,  
even though he is a successful actor, everything else falls apart --  
so the music has a certain tension between melancholic and upbeat..
We are opening on the 20th.

In October I will be part of a dance production (opening October  
10th). Sunday we had an audition for dancers (I wanted to call it a  
casting, but the dancers kept calling it audition -- I was under the  
impression that "audire" was the latin word for listening, but  
anyway...) which was incredible. We are looking for 3 dancers and had  
12 people who were all excellent at the first audition -- it was just  
amazing to watch them dance and we wanted to work with all of them...;)

At the end of May we start to work on yet another production about the  
German poet/writer Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. There is an amazing film  
about him. Basically in the early 70s he decided that writing wasn't  
his way of describing the world anymore and he started recording  
everything with a tape recorder (kindly provided to him by WDR Radio,  
who still have rights to most of the recordings). Brinkmann was run  
over by a car in London in 1975, presumably before they had the  
writing on the streets for tourists to "Look Right!"). The incredible  
part is how Harald Bergmann took these tapes as a soundtrack for a  
film -- and basically did a visual reenactment of those tapes with  
three actors in 2005/6 ("Brinkmanns Zorn").
We are still working on clearing all the rights and don't know  
*exactly* how we will approach this, but Brinkmann is something like a  
German beat.-poet, Hunter S Thompson or William Burroughs, maybe...;)

oh, and then I made some presets for Waldorf's upcoming Largo. Amazing  
synth! you must check it out!

just to let you know that I am still there and very much involved in  
music -- not so much in bars, right now...;-)

Kai