Anti-Groove

“What do we call groove?” 

Sound artist and composer Laura Robles invites five musicians to join her Anti-Groove lab sessions listening into this and more questions. The lab is based on her research into groove, rhythms, notation systems and experimental instrumentation and will work towards a performance within this year’s cooperation between MaerzMusik and SAVVY Contemporary.

REPETITION, LISTENING AND TRANSFORMATION

During the laboratory about groove and rhythm, the participants will explore how rhythms change when we change the subdivisions, when we move the accents, and when we try to listen to them in different ways. Leading questions will be: How do different people hear the same rhythm? What do you focus on? What do you feel in your body? What feels natural to you?

We will work with the idea of repetition. We will give ourselves time to stay inside one pattern and truly feel it. Through repetition, we will discover which groove we create together as a group. Not something fixed, but something that grows between us.

We will do different dynamics: listening exercises, improvisation, collective building of patterns. And we will talk about rhythm – not only in music, but also in life. The rhythm of crickets, the sound of hammers in construction sites, footsteps, breathing. The labs will create atmospheres using these elements and bring them into our musical work.

This laboratory is for people who already play their instrument well, feel comfortable improvising and are open to exploration, deep listening and collective work.

After these two days in the lab, we will play a concert together on 26.03.206 and share the music we created as a group.

 ABOUT LAURA ROBLES’ PRACTICE

In her, often collaborative, practice Robles reflects on the politics of musical notation, the deconstruction of Western classical musical hierarchies and the symbiotic and synergistic relationship between humans and instruments.

Wind instruments are often described as an extension of the artist’s breath. If this is the case, percussive ones such as the drum could be understood as an extension of the artist’s limbs – and every beat, be it with the palm of the hand or sole of the foot, inscribes itself within a practice and politics of speaking percussively. Viewed this way, the body becomes a score and repetition, a form of notation one can interpret and that is continuously shaped through practice, listening and collective call and response. The act of notation unfolds as an organic and living experience rather than as a fixed or linear, rigid one.

Often accompanied by multiple instruments – sometimes invented by long-term collaborators and specifically personalised for her – echoing in chorus to her cajon, Robles embraces the imperfect nature of these instruments, reclaiming the glitches through deep listening, mindful sensing and improvisation routines.

Taking cues from these principles, and in conversation with the curatorial team and long-term collaborators, this series of lab sessions will culminate both in a final solo and a collective live performance presented at SAVVY Contemporary.
 

LAURA ROBLES  is an improviser, composer, multi-instrumentalist and researcher born in Swaziland and raised in Lima-Peru. She studied traditional music of the central coast of Peru and Cuban music and shared a stage with legends such as Susana Baca, Juan Medrano Cotito, Jorge Roeder, Ernesto Hermosa, El Teatro del Milenio, Andres Chimango Lares, Laureano Rigol, Roberto Borrell, Los Hermanos Ballumbrosio, among others.

Considered one of the most accomplished Cajón players in the world, she has dedicated her career to the analysis of Folk rhythms with a strong focus on Afro-Peruvian folklore and the use of the cajon and its traditional rhythms in different musical genres. Now living and working in Germany, Robles has continued experimenting and exploring with what she calls “the anti-groove” and thus creates completely new possibilities of expression in modern jazz and improvised music.

In the last few years she has worked with artists and groups as diverse as American composer and Grammy Award winner Maria Schneider, Petros Klampanis, Bodek Janke, Lauer Large Orquestra, Pablo Held, Niels Klein, Ensemble Neue Musik Zürich, WDR Big Band, Wanja Slavin, Steffen Schorn among others.