Annette Krebs works at the interface of electroacoustic composition, improvisation and sound research. Within her projects and collaborations she explores new approaches to electroacoustic music and sound in connection with field recordings, instrumental music, video and performance.
She explores and creates new sounds and (real-time) compositions within series Konstruktion#: pieces of metal, glass, paper, foil, strings and other materials are played instrumentally and amplified via microphones. Their sounds are controlled, processed and mixed live in the computer using tablets and sensors.
She has performed at concerts and festivals worldwide, e.g.: Akademie der Künste, Heroines Of Sound Festival, Kontakte Festival (Berlin), Donaueschinger Musiktage, EMS Elektronmusik Studion(Stockholm), TonalÁtonal (Mexico City), Serralves em Festa(Porto), Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast), NOTAM (Oslo), Audio Foundation(Auckland), Mona Foma Festival (Tasmania), Festival Internacional de Arte Sonoro Monteaudio (Montevidéo), Conservatoire De Rennes, Namless Sound (Houston), SAIC-School of the Chicago Art Institute, Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá), Janáček Academy of Music (Brno)
Her music has been funded by numerous grants, e.g.: Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Berlin; Goethe-Institut; Cité Internationale des Arts Paris; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; EMS Elektronmusik Studion, Stockholm. It has been presented on the radio and in the press, including Positionen-Texte zur aktuellen Musik, Deutschlandradio Kultur, WDR-3, BR Klassik, His Voice (CZ), The Wire- adventures in sound and music (UK).
” Small sounds creep out in her music, meandering and hiding like specks of dust here and there in the room. But they shimmer and are actually like traces of Someone. Like flakes of skin, strands of hair. They move only slightly, but are there, creating refractions of light and barely discernible shadows. The voices that come in are both funny, touching and an unexpected extension of the small tussocky traces here and there that create the very structure, the easily recognizable.
Between these extremes, which are in fact echoes of the same thing, a Someone, a Here Comes Everybody – to quote Joyce.
This Someone may very well be Krebs, but when in one of the versions she opens the windows and plays passing sounds outside the studio, I suddenly find myself in the same room as her. Right next door. Clearly in the interior of two rooms, because outside, life rushes by in an unidentifiable stream. Cracks, noise and the acoustic and electronic blurring of insignificant deposits have never been clearer than here.
A place to be, where Someone and I continuously switch identities in the same room.
This is how Krebs creates an inner conversation where you and I, me and her, cannot be separated. It is about becoming oneself, discovering oneself in the reflection of the other, in the speech.
It sounds solemn and far from musical practice. But it is between the acoustic deposits of the floorboard and the brief incomprehensible moments of the suddenly enlarged voice that her music unfolds. And opens the windows to create the dizzying experience of two parallel rooms.
Annette Krebs’ new piece is, in its undeniability, a highlight of contemporary music. She knows all the possibilities of her instrument, and now she moves on a level that few others do. And she is constantly challenging herself in a way that I hardly know any improviser to be capable of. If the wretched and worn-out concept of experiment fits anywhere, it is here, because it questions and re-evaluates Krebs’ own practice at the highest level. Experimental can only be that which dares to be totally unfaithful to itself – even to better knowledge. Better knowledge – isn’t that what ultimately steers both improvisation and experimentation away from the necessary faithlessness?”
Original text in Swedish about rush! by Thomas Millroth, SoundOfMusic, SE, 2014