One of the most finely tuned ears in music, Berlin's Rashad Becker utilizes real-time synthesis and sampling techniques, setting intricate sonic worlds into motion that recall the complexities of human speech and exotic aural phenomena. He plays solo alongside fellow PAN artist Eli Keszler. The percussionist/composer debuts a new trio work featuring performers Tom Chiu, violin, and Leila Bordreuil, cello.
Eli Keszler is a composer, artist and multi-instrumentalist based in New York City. In performance, he often plays drums, bowed crotales, and guitar in conjunction with his installations. In his ensemble compositions, he uses extended strings, motors, crotales, horns, and mechanical devices to create his sound, balancing intense harmonic formations with acoustic sustain, fast jarring rhythm, mechanical propulsion, dense textures, and detailed visual presentations. He has collaborated with Christian Wolff, Oren Ambarchi, Phill Niblock, Roscoe Mitchell, Tony Conrad, Joe McPhee, Loren Connors, Geoff Mullen, Jandek, and many others, and has recorded more than a dozen CDs and LPs for PAN, ESP-DISK and his own REL. Keszler’s "Breaker – NEUM", was premiered by members of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra at the Tektonics Festival in 2013.
Rashad Becker is a Berlin-based artist who creates precise, phantasmic computer sound designs encouraging audiences to focus their hearing. His carefully constructed, sparse improvisations, have unexpected qualities, and have been called conversational not only for his sampling of dissected human voices, but for the way these samples integrate with the timbre of his electronics. “It sounded like a long stream-of-consciousness sentence made up short syllables, electronic oohs and wahs, sections of muttering, and occasionally bickering. Whatever he does, it seems Becker has the knack of giving sound its voice.” (Scott McMillan in The Liminal)