Anti-Groove

“Who defines our understanding of groove?”

Join us for a solo as well as a collective live performance by Laura Robles and the participants of the lab sessions, presented at SAVVY Contemporary together with MaerzMusik. Over two days, sound artist and composer Laura Robles has worked with musicians invited through an open call in the framework of Anti-Groove lab sessions, based on her research into groove, rhythms, notation systems and experimental instrumentation.

The group works with the idea of repetition. During the Lab Sessions, they allowed for time to stay inside one musical pattern and truly feel it. Through repetition, they aim to discover which groove they create as a group. Not something fixed, but something that grows between them.

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 embedded within it 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.

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.