MARIE AWADIS
Marie Awadis, the Armenian pianist and composer based in Germany, is known for her sensitive sound. Intimate and poetic, Marie’s music aims at communicating the depth of human emotions. Always centered around her instrument, the piano, she draws influences from the life
experiences that have shaped her as a human, from deep roots in classical traditions to recurrent folkloristic harmonic elements of her native Armenia.
Born into a musical family, she stood on stage for the first time at the age of five, singing with her father’s band. As she started piano lessons, she focused on the classical repertoire and became active in performing solo concerts, with pieces from Bach to Rachmaninov and Schönberg, beside chamber music, choir accompaniments and studio projects.
Marie received her Bachelor degree in Lebanon and her studies in Germany at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover. During her stuies, she performed with the Lebanese National symphonic orchestra and also established the duo Karma with Armenian cellis Karolin Scholz, performing classical as well as traditional repertoires. Marie started to compose and wrote her first cello duo waltz. In 2015 she released her debut solo album Echoes, followed by Searching two years later.
Since 2018 Marie is actively playing concerts in Germany and Europe, and collaborating with different artists for studio recordings and live performances. Recently, she wrote an album especially for the unique Klavins M189 Concert Una Corda, which she just finished recording and will release in 2020.
ANNE MÜLLER
GRAND RIVER
Aimée Portioli (b. 1985), known as Grand River is a Dutch-Italian composer and poly-instrumentalist producer based in Berlin. While mainly connected to the fields of electronic music and sound design, her compositions transcend these genres.
Influenced by classical minimal music, Grand River’s work integrates a large variety of sound structures and symphonic calculations in which she crafts absorbing experimental and ambient narrations combining traditional composition with contemporary sound research.
Her first release “Crescente”, was released via Spazio Disponibile in 2017 and has been named as one of the best releases of the year by XLR8R. Since then, her work has been presented in festivals and venues across the world such as Berghain, Mutek, Mapping Festival, Nachtdigital, Le Guess Who, De School, Paral·lel Festival, The Labyrinth, Funkhaus, and many more. Together with the visual artist Marco C. she sometimes presents the A/V performance called “0,13%”.
Her full-length debut album “Pineapple” followed in 2018 on Spazio Disponibile along with participations on Ghostly International and the Australian Longform Editions in 2019. In September 2020 she released “Blink A Few Times To Clear Your Eyes” on Editions Mego. Since 2016, Aimée also runs the record label One Instrument.
HOSHIKO YAMANE
CEEYS
“It’s an extraordinary piece of music. It’s the work of two brothers, Sebastian on cello and Daniel on piano, and together they play as CEEYS. I saw them premiere tracks from their new album at a gig that I went to very recently in Berlin. This is a project which is written about the buildings that surrounded them in their childhood, growing up on the streets of East Berlin.”
DIANE BARBÉ
Diane is a sound artist and researcher based in Berlin. With a classical training in traverse flute and violin in French conservatories, she soon began to experiment with electronic instruments and field recordings to widen the narrative possibilities of her practice. The key, for her, is to delve deeper into the realm of sound –beyond our hearing range, beyond acoustic waves– to create music as a meditative, environmental experience.
Diane currently works as a recordist for documentaries and is finished a degree in Sound Studies at the University of Arts in Berlin (UdK). Until its closure in 2019, she hosted the feminist music and political talk show Hystereo on Berlin Community Radio. Diane has performed live in festivals and sleep concerts across Europe and the US, with a particular predilection for outdoor settings where “sound trap” microphones complement her setup. She released a cassette of live performances called The River by the Tree with the experimental label Jungle Gym in early 2019.