Elias Stemeseder / Christian Lillinger PENUMBRA

Saturday, May 20, at 21:00
main stage

Elias Stemeseder (piano, spinet, synthesizer, electronics)
Christian Lillinger (drums, sampler, synthesizer)

Photo: promo

This tandem, whose concept and set of instruments hint at rather unconventional music, is composed of the Austrian pianist Elias Stemeseder, who has also lived in the USA and worked there with prominent musicians (John Zorn’s Bagatelles project, Greg Cohen, several Jim Black bands), and German drummer Christian Lillinger (Punkt.Vrt.Plastik, Koma Saxo, Hyperactive Kid). The two musicians will present the PENUMBRA project, which they describe as a musical utopia and a work in progress, given that other musicians are expected to join them in the future. In addition to drums and piano, both of them use electronic instruments, and Stemeseder also plays the spinet, a baroque instrument similar to the piano, or a smaller form of harpsichord, which is an important element of the duo’s experimental music at the crossroads of jazz, electronics and avant-garde approaches. At the heart of the project is the re-appropriation of the baroque performance method: the basso continuo (the technique of combining the bass line and chords) as the harmonic-percussive driving force of the baroque ensemble which Stemeseder and Lillinger achieve with the help of an amplified spinet and numerous percussion instruments. The debut album Penumbra, which was released in 2022 on the prestigious label Plaist, was described in the online magazine Salt Peanuts as a “futurist experiment” and “the urgent and nervous collisions of distorted keyboard sounds and broken rhythmic patterns”.