SOCO Festival and CTM Festival together present a concert divided in two acts. Berliners Jan Jelinek and Andrew Pekler stage their multi-media project Jan Jelinek & Andrew Pekler play Ursula Bogner for the first time in Latin America, alongside the exclusive premiere of Uruguayan artist, Par. The outstanding programme is presented in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Goethe Institut of Uruguay. Tickets will soon be made available by invitation only.

The Goethe Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany. Its worldwide activities promote knowledge of the German language abroad and cultivate intercultural cooperation.

Jan Jelinek & Andrew Pekler play Ursula Bogner

According to his own narrative, it was thanks to a chance encounter that German producer Jan Jelinek discovered the estate of the late Ursula Bogner (1946–94), a pharmacist from West Berlin who had solitarily pursued her interest in synthesizers, drawing, and borderline sciences for over twenty years. Flying back from Vilnius after a Northern European tour, Jelinek happened to sit next to Bogner’s son, Sébastien. Some time after that fateful flight, Jelinek received a box of Ursula Bogner’s works. Recorded between 1969 and 1988, the body of work made contributed to the early pure-electronics compositions recorded in Germany at that time, meriting a posthumous ranking among the post-war avant-garde. Jelinek has since edited and published excerpts from Bogner’s acoustic, photographic and graphic oeuvre (none of which was publically divulged in her lifetime) via his own Faitiche label, in partnership with Mo Loschelder, Andrew Pekler, and Kassian Troyer. Questions as to the credibility of Ursula Bogner’s biography and body of work and debate around whether Jelinek and she were one and the same person remain unresolved, but as author and musician Momus wrote in his book, Ursula Bogner – Sonne = Blackbox, such questions are largely irrelevant: "Every lie creates a parallel world; the world in which it is true. So I am interested in the parallel world in which Ursula Bogner really is credible, and really exists".

In presenting themselves as the musical interpreters of the character of Ursula Bogner, Jelinek and Pekler’s performance dovetails with the forthcoming fifteenth edition of CTM Festival theme, DIS  CONTINUITY: highlighting select trajectories of past idiosyncratic music experimentalists and the ways contemporary artists both interpret and evolve their ideas and perpetuate their legacy.

Jan Jelinek

Jan Jelinek is a musician, producer, label manager, and remixer who draws inspiration from jazz, dub, funk, soul and house. He has released music on German label ~scape under his own name, with his improvisational trio Groupshow, and elsewhere under a variety of other monikers, including Farben, Gramm, and as part of imaginary band, The Exposures. Bypassing the rules of traditional musicianship, Jan Jelinek constructs collages comprised of tiny sound fragments from the lost and found products of samplers, tape recorders, media players, and other recording instruments. He often works with loops and slight modulations to distil the gist of a piece of music and define it more clearly, while masking its original source. Jelinek has also collaborated with the Australian jazz trio, Triosk, and the Japanese improvisation group, Computer Soup.

Andrew Pekler

Born in Russia, bred in California, and currently based in Berlin, Andrew Pekler traces his roots to early jazz/electronica experiments, toying with subtle essences of funk, transformed remnants of Berlin urban dub, and raw found sounds that build and dissolve in angular spaces of sliding, atonal melodies. His inaugural album under the alias Sad Rockets, Plays (Source Records, 1997) is an intriguing take on the interplay between man and machine: an atmosphere of free-spirited jazz improvisation entering the world of clicks and cuts. His first full-length album under his own name, Station to Station, debuted via Stephan Betke’s ~scape label in 2002, and he has most recently released a collaboration with Guiseppi Ielasi entitled Holiday For Sampler (Planam, 2013). Pekler is also the creator of TeaspoonCAS, a handheld, voltage-controlled, instant-looping playback sampler, and performs with Jan Jelinek’s improvisational trio, Groupshow.

Par

Par is the solo project of Uruguayan artist, Nacho Adda. His first EP, Control, was a Best Electronic Music Album nominee for the Graffiti Awards, and its follower, 012, furthers Adda’s exploration of electronic instrumentation. His most recent album, The Future, conceptually links music synthesizers to science fiction and apocalyptic visions of the future, and was released via Biatch Corp Recordings in May 2013.

SOCO Festival

SOCO Festival is an international music festival of Uruguay that strives to strengthen the relationship between music, art, and ideas. SOCO Festival is dedicated to exploring contemporary electronic, digital, and experimental music, as well as a wide range of activities combining art, design, and technology in the context of sound.

CTM Festival

CTM - Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Arts - is the most important festival of new pop, experimental electronic music in German-speaking countries today. Over its fifteen-year tenure, CTM (formerly club transmediale) has earned a reputation as an essential event, considered as one of the world's most innovative festivals and repeatedly lauded by the press as “the largest gathering of experimental electronic music in Germany".
→ CTM.15th / 24 January - 2 February 2014 / Berlin