ABE Nsemble. Metropolitan Hotel. 10 Sep 2025
Two award-winning German sound artists visiting Australia, Johannes S. Sistermanns and Joachim Zoepf of the (unusually spelled) ABE N semble, gave a most enthralling performance of experimental sound art at the Metropolitan Hotel’s monthly Experimental Music Night on 10 September.
Introducing the performance, Sistermanns indicated that they are undertaking research on the question, ‘how does (the) new emerge?’, a question that he says bedevils sound artists and instrument makers.
Sistermanns’ wide-ranging oeuvre explores all manner of sound, its generation, its functioning and effects in space and its apprehension by and significance to the listener. As well as using musical instruments and other objects, his experimental approach often involves activating the walls and other fixtures in the performance space.
Saxophonist and bass clarinettist, composer and teacher Joachim Zoepf also specialises in improvised electro-acoustic performance. While Sistermanns performed on a 39-string monochord, Zoepf used electronics and a laptop to process the sound produced by the closely microphoned monochord.
A monochord is a stringed instrument with a long, hollow timber body and guitar-like sound holes on either side that was developed in Greece and used by Pythagoras around 500 BCE to calculate musical intervals. It is thus a seminal device in the history of musical notation, composition and instrumental development, and its use today invites broader consideration of the possibilities of sound production and reception.
The performance opened with Sistermanns singing in overtones while slowly stepping into the Metropolitan Hotel’s small, intimate and enthusiastically crowded music room. He often uses overtone signing to identify the standing sound wave that is characteristic of a space.
He then began performing on the monochord — strumming it with his hands or small sticks, bowing it with a violin bow, stroking the strings with paper or a stone, placing an ‘exciter’ (a small device that vibrates) on the strings to generate a drone, tapping the monochord’s body, pressing a contact microphone against it while playing it to amplify its resonances, and singing into it through its sound holes. These diverse and exploratory playing techniques combined to generate a unique and incredible range of sounds.
At the desk, Joachim Zoepf adroitly mixed the sound from the monochord with prerecorded material including birdsong, a short speech and many other musical sounds to create a densely layered and at times quite overwhelming orchestration of sonic material. The audience could try to guess the prerecorded sound sources and their symbolic potential, consider the effects of the sound in the room and their experience as listeners, or simply bring their awareness to the sounds as they emerge and dissipate, and observe the action on stage.
This use of the monochord greatly extends Pythagoras’s experimental study. But the effect is not only aural — the physicality of Sistermanns’s singing and exploration of the monochord created a highly theatrical effect, and he dramatically plunged the violin bow into the monochord’s sound holes, like an arrow through a body, to conclude the performance. The sound could not be separated from its performative characteristics.
In the notes to their album How does the (new) emerge, the ABE Nsemble asks at what point the ‘new’ emerges — when instruments are played, or when the resulting sound fills the air in the performance space, or when the sound vibrations in the air impact the surfaces of the space. They question the linear time sequence involved in performance. They state,
“The ‘nsemble’ plays nothing to the audience. ‘The nsemble’ dissolves the usual audience relationship to become a situational-intuitive creative process. Our focus: the moment of the emergence of a spatial digital performance using sensor and audio technologies as well as electro/acoustic instruments. We assume this is a way to provoke the new.”
This profoundly stimulating performance explored the phenomenology of sound — in the absence of any kind of compositional structure, the listener becomes consciously aware of the subjective experience of listening and of the dynamic relationship between sound in space, its physicality and its unfolding in time.
The third member of the ABE Nsemble, Adelaide composer and sound artist Gabriella Smart, was unfortunately unavailable for this event.
Chris Reid
When: 10 Sep 2025
Where: Metropolitan Hotel
More info: sistermanns.eu
The ABE Nsemble’s CD is available at Bandcamp: https://joachimzoepf.bandcamp.com/album/how-does-the-new-emerge
