2025 May 8 – Mainz/Tonelli/Centazzo&Groebel (english)
May 8, 20:30h – Morphine Raum
Köpenicker Str. 147, 10997 Berlin, Hinterhof 1. Etage
Mainz/Tonelli/Centazzo&Groebel
The visual artist Matthias Groebel and the transdisciplinary improvising musician Matthias Mainz have been collaborating since the early 2000s, beginning with the video piece Skullhop, a first collaboration from 2003, which is part of Groebel's recent solo show Skull Fuck at Modern Art, London. Groebel has put together a trio of Mainz's musical collaborators for May 8 in order to generate audio material for new joint works. This trio will feature Mainz, Canadian soundsinger and poet Chris Tonelli, and the Italian-American percussionist Andrea Centazzo, and will combine sound poetry, aggressive prose monologues, percussive minimalism, and stylistic outbursts ranging from jazz, to free jazz, to new music.
Chris Tonelli - Prose, Poetry, Soundsinging
Andrea Centazzo - Framedrums, Cymbals, MalletKAT
Matthias Mainz - Prepared and Unprepared Piano, Electro-mechanical Mini Home Organs from Groebel's Internet Finds
Matthias Groebel - Montages of Video Works from the early 2000s, some of which are in the archive of the Imai Foundation in Düsseldorf and in the collection of the Federal Republic of Germany. “Trusted Faces” is currently being shown at the Albertinum in Dresden.
Photocredits: Dark Fred/Matthias Groebel; Andrea Centazzo_Sunglasses/Matthias Mainz; Andrea Centazzo_Percussion/David Neumann; Chris Tonelli/Mark-Steffen Göwecke; Matthias Mainz_Keyboard/Nikolaus Neuser; Groebel/Constantine//Spence
Groebel/Mainz
Groebel and Mainz met in the early 2000s as neighbors in loft apartments in an abandoned industrial warehouse in Cologne. The use of industrial wasteland in the north of Cologne by artists and creatives at the turn of the millennium was not only the beginning of gentrification, it also provided an opportunity for artists from different disciplines to come together. Matthias Groebel's first painting machine and the transdisciplinary improvisations of Matthias Mainz met here in curious proximity. Mainz and Groebel have since collaborated on several video works and have been in close contact ever since. Groebel and Mainz share a meticulous attention to detail in the preparatory planning of processual settings, which can be brought down by themselves at any moment with an element of anarchic pleasure. Common overlaps in the turn to the obscure off-scenes of the sub and high cultures of the 60s on the borders of psych-rock and free jazz do the rest. Skullhop, a first collaboration between Groebel and Mainz from 2003, was exhibited this year in Groebel's solo show Skull Fuck in Modern Art, London.
Since 2000, Matthias Mainz has been working in alternating cycles of three to five years on the penetration of political contemporary themes in montages of materials and methods from performative and visual art forms in ever new genres and milieus with musical-multistylistic concepts between improvisation and composition in jazz, new, and electronic music and contexts ranging from transmedia environment performances, to works with theater and dance theater, to conceptual and curatorial contexts of transcultural and new music. His musical foundation as a conceptual improvising musician proves to be a unifying, continuous motif, in which the rawness and directness of noise, electronics and free jazz are combined with the delicacy of the softest noises and stylistic ties back to late-romantic free tonality in a paradoxically interconnected state of constant improvisational openness.
Since the late 1980s, Matthias Groebel has consistently worked on the transformation and deconstruction of media representation through machine painting in a self-designed DIY cosmos, the peculiarity of which perhaps derives precisely from its complete independence from prevailing artistic narratives and the social hierarchies of the art world. In recent years, Groebel's works have been read by a new generation of art viewers as a fascinating encounter of media archaeology, as a retrospective, forward-looking questioning of author and machine work and as an independent aesthetic work whose transformative, processual character leaves the direct view of and the construction of media and painting representation in an indeterminately changing relationship.
Chris Tonelli assembles texts and improvises with language and abstract sounds. Since the early 2010s, Tonelli has been collaging pieces of found text into matrices, from which he generates loudly poetic and often absurd and critical material in his performances. Tonelli is Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Popular Music at the University of Groningen and has published the volume Voices Found: Free Jazz & Singing on the history and theory of extranormal vocal techniques and improvisation.
Andrea Centazzo collaborated with the who's who of the European and American avant-garde of creative jazz and improvised music since the 1970s and has been releasing under his own label Ictus since 1976. Centazzo plays on a self-developed setup of tuned frame drums, gongs and cymbals and his playing combines influences from free jazz and minimal music. His use of sample triggers over the bass frame drums is reminiscent of the musical postmodernism of the late eighties. Centazzo has improvised with musicians such as Evan Parker, John Zorn, Derek Bailey, Steve Lacy, Don Cherry, Lester Bowie, Albert Mangelsdorf and Ernst-Ludwig Petrowski. Between 1979 and 1986, he brought together the European improvisational avant-garde with Gianluigi Trovesi, Theo Jörgensmann, Franz Koglmann, Carlos Zingaro and Mark Dresser, among others, in the Mitteleuropa Orchestra. As a composer influenced by minimal music, Centazzo has composed music-theatrical works and has been working on concepts of sound and video since the early 1980s.