How did you guys meet? How did Gamut begin? What kind of music and performances were you exploring at that time?

We come from different backgrounds: Marion worked with electronics and experimental music, Maciej played jazz guitar and wrote film music. So at first we worked with guitar and electronics – a lot of improvisation – gradually the guitar was modified more and more, and we moved towards each other stylistically. Finally, during a composition commission for the computer-controlled organ at the Kunst-Station St Peter, we discovered the fascination for the music machine, which has not let us go. There we also met the music mechanic Gerhard Kern – with him we developed our first music machines.

How do you prepare for your different performances? It is not the same playing at Berghain as playing in a Church.

The Berghain is also a temple. No matter if church or temple – we remain enthusiastic agnostics…

Talking about different performances; “Rossums Universal Robots”. How did you came up with the idea of reinterpreting this play? One can think that this theatrical piece by Karel Čapek fits into this new age of robots and man perfectly. But how did you, as Gamut, decide; let’s do this. What inspired you?

As a musical machine ensemble, the play for which the term “robot” was invented almost exactly 100 years ago was of course irresistible. R.U.R. is the second part of our human-machine music theater triptych. In the first part OVER THE EDGE CLUB (OTEC), we let an AI write the libretto – which became a cyber-psychedelic séance in which a superintelligence from the future looks back on its predecessors, who are now obsolete. Because as soon as you deal with AI, you’re in an arms race: what was considered non-plus-ultra yesterday is already obsolete today. In a way, R.U.R. is then the continuation: we look at an outdated vision of the future with a contemporary view. Frank Witzel, the librettist, then developed his own play with motifs from the material and introduced an interesting evolutionary idea: God creates man better than he is himself, and man creates the robot better than he is himself. But as we said, we are agnostics ;)

Still talking about RUR; the imagery of your play is so powerful and it complements perfectly with the music and sound that you bring. How was the process in terms of aesthetic for this performance in particular?

Thank you! We wanted to use the means we developed in OTEC again, at the same time the material was so powerful that we wanted to counter it with a kind of commenting chorus, like in Greek theater. After all, it’s probably the first material where the complete annihilation of all humanity is negotiated. It was incredibly inspiring that the RIAS Kammerchor – one of the world’s best choirs – was interested in singing this “chorus of robots” and “chorus of humans”! Because of the pandemic, this was logistically complicated to implement, so we pre-recorded the choir on video, and projected it during the performances. While in OTEC only synthetic voices were used, in RUR, besides the choir, two soloists are cast as robots, singing as countertenor and soprano in a similar range, while the last human is speaking. With the dancer Ruben Reniers we took up a character from OTEC who mediates between these worlds. We wanted to do justice to the historicity of the piece by citing stylistic devices from the 1920s such as Bauhaus and Futurism – as in Nina Rhodes’ stage design, using her stroboscopic discs. At the same time, the whole thing should not be nostalgia, but a contemporary music-theatre. Retro-futurism without the kitsch of steampunk.

Aggregate, defined as combining separate elements to form a whole. The music festival for automated pipe organs is that itself; working with elements of the digital and analog world, the human and the machine. There is a delicacy when curating a festival like this and when making music for these performances.

How do you choose the invited artists for the event? Are the performances always improvised or is there more structure?

After all, the organ itself consists of several aggregates – the wind bellows, different rows of pipes, whose various sounds are combined. A huge machine, always on the cutting edge of the technical development of the time. An acoustic synthesizer. Since the 1980s, organs have been equipped with computers and MIDI inputs.