Ignaz Schick

(born 1972)

Turntablist, sound artist, performer & composer. In his youth he studied the saxophone and performed in free jazz and avant rock bands. At the same time he was getting obsessed with multitrack tape machines, record players and effect boxes and he started experimenting with many different instruments and sound making devices. After college he briefly studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and worked for several years as an assistent for contemporary composer Josef Anton Riedl. Since the late 1995 he works and lives in Berlin where he became an active and integral force of the so-called "Berlin Nouvelle Vague" and the blossoming "real time music" scene. From the middle of the nineties onwards his interest and activities almost completely shifted towards live-electronics and after testing various instrumentations (hard- & software samplers, signal processing, contact mics, field recordings, ...) he developed his own and quite unique electro-acoustic set-up which he calls "rotating surfaces". Various objects and materials (from wood, metal, plastic, paper or violin bows and cymbals) are played directly on the rotating metal plate of the turntable and  the vibrations are simply amplified with a small condensator microphone. With this set-up he covers many different styles of contemporary experimental music - ranging from extreme reductionism via ambient, industrial, musique concrete, electronica to harsh noise. Besides his favorite setting, the direct duo-confrontation with the likes of Chris Abrahams (AUS), Alexei Borisov (RUS), Sebastian Buczek (PL), Phil Durrant (GB), Gunnar Geisse (D), GX Jupitter-Larsen/The Haters (USA), Dawid Szczesny (PL), Martin Tetreault (CAN) or Marcel Tuerkowsky (D) (...) he is member and founder of many different ensembles like Perlonex, Snake Figures Arkestra, Phosphor, Blind Snakes, Decollage, N.I.E., ....

He has collaborated with numerous international artists (most notably Don Cherry & Charlemagne Palestine)and toured and performed clubs & festivals all over Eastern- and Western Europe, the USA, Russia and the Balkans. He released many albums on labels like Zarek, Edition Zangi, edition x, Irrah, Potlatch, Bad Alchemy, Charhizma, Staalplaat, Nexsound, Non Visual Objects, Improvised Music From Japan or Absinth and he was part of radio broadcasts and productions for ORF-Kunstradio, ORF-Zeitton, BR2, DLR, DLF, WDR3, DRS2 or Radio Copernicus (...) Furthermore he has been curating festivals of experimental music from the early 90s onwards (FAM, Erase & Reset, Tim Shifts, ...) Since 2005 he has realized several sound installations and was awarded with the sound art scholarships by the City of Berlin in 2006 and a residency at Kuenstlerhaeuser Worpswede in 2008.

"Ignaz Schick is a busy man. Along with running the Zarek label, he’s a vanguard of European improvisation. (...) Schick plays vaguely enough “electronics”, which take to mean feedback inducers, samplers, buzzers, hissers, and miscealleneous noisemakers.
Ignaz Schick does an admirable job of contributing to the slew of mind-expanding music coming out of Europe. Zarek is a label to watch, and (...) essential for fans of creative new music." 

Nirav Soni, Ink 19

"Ignaz Schick has surprised me with every release of late, becoming increasingly prolific in the areas of new improvisation and electro-acoustic music."

Richard di Santo, Incursion Music Review, Canada

"The Berlin scene has fascinatingly burgeoned in recent times, and much of the city’s developing electro-acoustic improv activity centres around or to some extent visibly involves Ignaz Schick. His electronics have featured on a series of releases which all document an intriguing probing of the improvisational interface between acoustic instruments and electronically- and computer-generated sounds" 

Nick Cain, Opprobrium (UK)