Simon Berz Solo ROCKING DESK  in Vladivostoc Russia 2016
Channel: Simon Berz
Date: 14/03/2019

About Simon Berz
His work in experimental and improvised music, in sound art and new forms of performance aims at innovation, interaction and participation. Simon Berz is a drummer and sound artist. He uses improvised music to create bridges between his compositions and performances to visual arts, dance and film. His work takes place in artist-run spaces as well as in clubs, galleries and concert halls.
Since his youth he has been involved in developing instruments, sound/art installations and performances based on listening and observing, sound and materials research, on the implementation of experimental formats and their aesthetic mediation. As well as developing his own rhythmic and sound language through an electro-acoustic drumset called the Rocking Desk, he has also developed a “lithophone” consisting of stones producing a sound made by liquid dripping from drip bags that he amplifies and distorts electronically. In 2011, this sound installation was awarded the “Werkjahr des Kantons Zug” prize.

Simon Berz works together with instrument builders, technicians and scientists to design sound installations focussing on phenomena like resonance and feedback. How do you interact with ice, water, stone, air, wind and fire? What happens in the space between people? What is resonance in technical as well as in psychological and energy terms? The sound artist explores ways of making it possible to experience human energy fields or to allow the resonance produced by a self-playing stone to sound.

What drives Simon, and what he seeks to transform and convey aesthetically, is a “mingling” of acoustic curiosity and its technical implementation in combination with the surrounding context – in nature, in society. The sound material is crucial as is the space in which art and sound take place – whether a former Jewish fabric store in Langstrasse, Zürich, a volcanic landscape in Iceland, or Peiden, a tiny hamlet in the Grisons. Simon considers improvised music to be an unstable condition in which you can find yourself. It represents uncertainty, tension.