Ignaz Schick

Ignaz Schick is a Berlin based sound artist, composer, concept & visual artist. He also performs as an instrumentalist on turntables, objects, live-electronics, alto saxophone & flutes.

In his youth he studied the saxophone and performed in free jazz and avant rock bands. At the same time he was getting obsessed with multitrack tape machines, record players and effect boxes and he started experimenting with many different instruments and sound making devices. After college he briefly studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and worked for several years as an assistant for contemporary composer Josef Anton Riedl. Since 1995 he lives & works in Berlin where he became an active and integral force of the so-called "Berlin Nouvelle Vague" and the blossoming "experimental" music scene. He has been also prolific as curator (Festival für Andere Musik, Erase & Reset, Time Shifts, TITO, Echtzeitmusiktage 2010, Flux Festival 2018, Fuchsfest 2021, ...) and runs the experimental music label Zarek.

Schick has toured worldwide solo or with groups like Perlonex, Phosphor, Berlin Sound Connective, Nighthawk Kitchen, Tree People, Splitter Orchestra or ILOG. He has released music on several labels like Absinth, Astral Spirits, Charhizmha, Irrah, Le Petit Mignon, Mikroton, Non Visual Objects, Potlatch, Staalplaat and his own imprint Zarek and collaborated worldwide with more than a hundred international sonic artists - amongst others with such great artists as Mwata Bowden, Don Cherry, Douglas Ewart, Limpe Fuchs, Sven- Ake Johansson, George Lewis, Toshimaru Nakamura, Charlemagne Palestine, Andrea Parkins, Keith Rowe, Matthias Spahlinger or Martin Tetreault.

Since 2012 he mainly focusses on conceptual composition and experimental radio pieces. In parallel he has started several new projects with a younger generation of Berlin experimentalists (Yemen Breakfast, Radio Nightmares, Hawking, Overdue, KUDU, Ilog, ...). He also frequently collaborates with Frank Gratkowski, Achim Kaufmann, Christian Lillinger or Harri Sjöström and has founded the 12-piece workshop ensemble Circuit Training which focusses on the realization of conceptual graphic & verbally instructed scores.

He has received various composition, travel & research stipends for Paris, South-East-Asia, Los Angeles & Istanbul for writing new pieces and researching the local scenes. He received the prestigious composition fellowships at Villa Aurora (2017) & Kulturakademie Tarabya Istanbul (2018). Schick took part in several exhibitions and showed a larger selection of his audio/visual works in a solo exhibition at Schauraum K3 in Bavaria (2019) and at the Berlin based project space Liebig12 in 2021. In 2022 besides several festival appearances, a two months sound art residency at Sonoscopia Porto and the curation/production of REFLUX Festival of Contemporary Electro-Acoustic Music in Berlin he focussed on the large scale research project „Kolkata City Sounds“ in collaboration with Goethe Institue Kolkata which involved a one month research in April followed by one month of production and workshop period in November finally resulting in a four hour durational concert in January 2023 involving 7 local musicians from different sonic scenes.

Awards

1994 Composition stipend by the City of Munich
2006 Sound art stipend by the Senate Berlin & Tesla Berlin
2008 Sound art stipend by the Federal State of Lower Saxony/ Künstlerhäuser Worpswede
2011 Composition stipend by the Senate Berlin
2016 Composition stipend by the Senate Berlin/Cité Des Arts Paris
2017 Cultural exchange stipend global by the Senate Berlin for Malaysia/Laos/Indonesia/Vietnam 2017 Composition stipend Villa Aurora Los Angeles
2018 Composition stipend Kulturakademie Tarabya Istanbul/Turkey by the Goethe Institute
2020 Work & research stipend composition/sound art Senate Berlin
2020/21 Work & research stipend composition/sound art Musikfonds
2021 Work stipend INITIAL Akademie der Künste Berlin
2022 Sound art stipend + residency Sonoscopia Porto/Portugal

Gear

Alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, bamboo flutes, turntables, voltage controlled sampler, objects, selfmade instruments & devices, ...

The Worlds of Ignaz Schick

by Mark Corroto
March 11, 2024

It may be a bit of hyperbole to call Ignaz Schick a Renaissance man. If, though, we take architect Leon Battista Alberti's (1404-72) definition “a man can do all things if he will," then labeling Schick with that epithet is not such a stretch. The German composer, musician, turntablist, visual artist, label chief, and inventor has an unconventional and curious innovative mind. Since a young age, he eschewed pop music and was fascinated by the avant-garde. His early contact with ...

"Ignaz Schick has surprised me with every release of late, becoming increasingly prolific in the areas of new improvisation and electro-acoustic music." Richard di Santo, Incursion Music Review, Canada

"The Berlin scene has fascinatingly burgeoned in recent times, and much of the city’s developing electro-acoustic improv activity centres around or to some extent visibly involves Ignaz Schick. His electronics have featured on a series of releases which all document an intriguing probing of the improvisational interface between acoustic instruments and electronically- and computer-generated sounds" Nick Cain, Opprobrium (UK)