Thomas Lehn
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Companion Species
Jennifer Walshe • voice, trumpet
Thomas Lehn • analogue synthesizer
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photo © Claudia Höhne
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Jennifer Walshe & Thomas Lehn
Companion Species
Jennifer Walshe - voice, trumpet
Thomas Lehn - analogue synthesizer
The Irish composer and vocalist Jennifer Walshe was one of the performers at the first edition of the comprovise festival in Cologne, which Thomas Lehn co-curated in 2009. This led to a decade of Lehn and Walshe working together on many projects, most notably collaborations with ensemble]h[hiatus, who premiered five compositions of Walshe and performed her work at festivals including hcmf (Huddersfield), November Music (Den Bosch) and musica Strasbourg.
During the Monheim Triennale 2022, performing in a trio with Norwegian musician Stian Westerhus, Lehn and Walshe experimented with feeding Walshe‘s voice directly into Lehn’s synthesiser. The performance was a huge success, and for the musicians, the desire immediately arose to continue exploring the special playing situation of a mutually networked setup of the duo, in which the voice is both sonically modulated and alienated by the synthesiser and as well provides signal voltages that control the parameters of the synthesiser's sound synthesis. A biological-electronic entanglement in which no party is sure where their agency begins or ends.
www.milker.org
www.thomaslehn.com
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biographies
Jennifer Walshe | Thomas Lehn
photo © Claudia Höhne
^ ^^ Jennifer Walshe
“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. THE SITE has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, was released on Tetbind in 2020. The album uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford. Her work was recently profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker.
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Thomas Lehn
has been one of the most innovative and successful musical personalities in the field of electroacoustic music in the practices of improvisation and composition for years. He was trained as a sound engineer and pianist at the music academies in Detmold and Cologne from 1979 to 1987. As a pianist, he was active in both classical chamber music and jazz ensembles throughout the 1980s. Gradually a shift took place in both of the musical practices he has always pursued, interpretation and improvisation: expanding from traditional to contemporary musics. The analogue synthesizer re-entered his musical life during the early 1990ies and soon the EMS Synthi AKS became his second main instrument. As a synthesizer interpreter – live and in studio – he has realized works by Éliane Radigue, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Bogusław Schaeffer and Zbigniew Karkowski, among others. He was soloist in the world premiere of Peter Jakober's dort with Klangforum Wien at musikprotokoll festival and in the CD recording of Christopher Fox's Topophony with the WDR Symphony Orchestra. He is founding member of the ensemble]h[iatus, which dedicates itself since 2006 to contemporary improvisation and interpretation, and had premierred commissioned works by Vinko Globokar, Anthony Pateras, Jennifer Walshe, Jürg Frey a.m.o. . He demonstrates continuity in longstanding activities in ensembles such as Konk Pack, Toot, Thermal, MIMEO, speak easy or duos with Marcus Schmickler, Tiziana Bertoncini and Gerry Hemingway. More recent are trios with John Butcher the pianists John Tilbury and Matthew Shipp, and electrovoX with Ute Wassermann and Richard Scott. Concert tours have taken him throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada and the USA. His artistic work is documented on about 100 recordings.
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audio samples
audio 1 (0:43)
audio 2 (0:46)
audio 3 (1:00)
audio 4 (4:11)
photo © Sara Zlanabitnig
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downloads
press photos
© Alain Julien & Dimitri Djuric
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dates
Sun. 21 May 2023, Hamburg @ Papiripar Festival
Sat. 14 January 2023, Vienna @ echoraum
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updated on March 31, 2024