Ignaz Schick

Turntablist, saxophonist, composer, sound & visual artist & curator.
Founder of Zarek & Zarek (labels).
He studied the saxophone and performed in free jazz and avant rock bands. At the same time he was getting obsessed with multitrack tape machines, record players and effect boxes and he started experimenting with many different instruments and sound making devices. After college he briefly studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and worked for several years as an assistent for the contemporary composer Josef Anton Riedl. Since the late 1995 he works and lives in Berlin where he became an active and integral force of the so-called “Berlin Nouvelle Vague” and the blossoming “real time music” scene. From the middle of the nineties onwards his interest and activities almost completely shifted towards live-electronics and after testing various instrumentations (hard- & software samplers, signal processing, contact mics, field recordings, ...) he developed his own and quite unique electro-acoustic set-up which he calls “rotating surfaces”. Various objects and materials (from wood, metal, plastic, paper or violin bows and cymbals) are played directly on the rotating metal plate of the turntable and the vibrations are simply amplified with a small condensator microphone. With this set-up he covers many different styles of contemporary experimental music – ranging from extreme reductionism/EAI via ambient, industrial, musique concrete, electronica to harsh noise. He has been working with a huge list of international experimental artists, most known are Don Cherry & Charlemagne Palastine. Besides those he works frequently in groups or in duo with Burkhard Beins, Andrea Belfi, Alexei Borisov, Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann, Matteo Pogo, Dawid Szczesny, Martin Tetreault, Marcel Türkowsky, Sabine Vogel, ...