Laminar Flow

Matthias Ockert's works centre on border-crossing between different styles and genres. Being a qualified architect, he gets ideas for his works even from the art of interior design, transferring spatial structures to the music for example. Unusual combinations of musical elements emerge automatically for the jazz guitar player and previous composition student of Wolfgang Rihm and Hanspeter Kyburz: He combines a distorted electric guitar with flute and violin, or puts succinctly rhythmic passages which are reminiscent of jazz improvisations next to synthetic sound surfaces. Due to his knowledge of different, even non-musical working methods, it is 'quite unsurprising that Matthias Ockert's work as a musician, which is grounded so extensively, faces up particularly to the non-tangible; that the titles of his pieces like to play with aporiae; that his musical language has no reservations toward methods and materials and no Keep Off! signs in the musical landscape'. (Hans-Jürgen Linke)

For the present portrait CD, Matthias Ockert combines contemporary ensemble music, jazz music and electronic composition. The majority of the works released here are new productions recorded at the Centre for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe and are released on this CD for the first time.

A production by ZKM | Centre for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe and Hessischer Rundfunk.