This two-day workshop will explore electroacoustic improvisation as a performative, compositional and relational practice. Valerio Tricoli will guide participants through a series of individual and collective exercises focused on listening, interaction, sonic decision-making, and the construction of form in real time.

Designed for 12 participants with some prior experience in electronic or experimental music, the workshop is conceived as a practical laboratory in which instruments, technologies, aural and physical spaces, and bodies become active agents within a shared sonic environment. Participants are invited to bring their own instruments and performance setups — electronic, acoustic, hybrid, analog, digital, custom-built, or found-object based.

Across two days of hands-on sessions (5 hours per day), the workshop will alternate between solo, duos, and ensemble configurations. Through improvisations, critical listening sessions, discussion, and reflection, the workshop will place particular emphasis on:

- Developing an individual language.

- Exploring the relationship between gesture, technology, and sound.

- Understanding improvisation as a generator of form, tension, memory, and narrative.

- Investigating the role of silence, unpredictability, instability, and the generative force of failure within performance.

- Practicing active listening within ensemble situations and collective environments.

- Developing strategies for adapting or redesigning instruments and live electronic systems in order to strengthen improvisational responsiveness and flexibility.

- Approaching improvisation as a method for generating material for future compositions, and fixed-media works.

Participants will be encouraged to critically examine their own technical and performative configurations in order to better understand how certain choices either enable or limit spontaneity, responsiveness, complexity, and interaction. Through discussion and practical experimentation, the workshop will address strategies for simplifying, expanding, destabilizing, or reorganizing individual setups so that instruments become more flexible, sensitive, and performative within improvised contexts. Attention will be given not only to sound production itself, but also to ergonomics, interfaces, and the physical presence of the performer in relation to technology, space and the audience.

Echoing John Cage’s idea that “an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen,” participants will work with uncertainty as an active compositional force rather than an obstacle to control.

Particular emphasis will be placed on deep listening, the dynamics of group interplay, spatial awareness, and the emergence of structure over time. Improvisation will be explored as a way of producing forms that cannot be entirely preconceived: complex sonic situations, unstable architectures, and evolving relationships, addressing also the possibility of improvisation as compositional research — a method for generating concrete material and formal ideas that may later be developed into fixed compositions or studio-based electroacoustic works.

The workshop will conclude with a public presentation at Morphine Raum in Berlin. Rather than a conventional concert format, the final performance will function as an open and evolving collective system involving all participants together with Valerio Tricoli in a large ensemble configuration. Musicians will enter and exit the performance dynamically, generating shifting constellations of sound, density, and interaction. The concert will become an extension of the workshop process itself: a complex environment in which listening, decision-making, and collective form emerge in real time before an audience.

Rather than proposing a fixed aesthetic model, the workshop encourages participants to sharpen and question their own artistic practice through experimentation, collective exchange, and critical reflection.

All participants are required to send a detailed technical rider and equipment list to enrollment@hyperlinear.net in advance of the workshop.

On the first day, participants should arrive 1 hour before the official start time in order to allow sufficient time for setup, sound checks, and the configuration of all individual systems.

https://valeriotricoli.bandcamp.com/music

Enrollment fee per participant 275€

Limited to Max. 12 participants

Get in touch to enroll via enrollment@hyperlinear.net 

Design by Joe Gilmore