The Viennese composer, instrumentalist and vocalist Mia Zabelka is internationally sought after. She tanks up on energy at her "klang.haus" (literally, sound house) in the Austrian region of Styria.
Mia Zabelka invites audiences and artists four times a year to the wein.klang (sound of wine) festival at the klang.haus in Untergreith, in the Styrian wine-growing region of Sankt Johann im Saggautal, where the artistic events are in harmony with the surrounding landscape and the four seasons. Last Autumn, the guests at Zabelka's hillside home included the Slovenian avant-garde accordion player Bratko Bibic with his band, the Pakistani electronic musician and bassist Zahra Mani and the iconic pioneer of German electronica Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Cluster). In the winter, with chilly outdoor temperatures, the atmosphere is more intimate, although there are always elements of surprise.
Zabelka, born in 1963 and taught by Kurt Schwertsik, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and Dieter Kaufmann, is one of the highest-profile protagonists of new music in Austria. As a composer, violinist and vocal artist, the Viennese performer has developed a broad spectrum of activity both as a soloist and in various cooperative partnerships, like her current duo projects with the trumpeter Franz Hautzinger and with Zahra Mani (see above). Both are members of Zabelka's One.Night.Band, which she founded with Mani in 2003. The flexible ensemble has collaborated with artists including the pianist Alvin Curran, singer Anna Hauf and the great accordion explorer Pauline Oliveros. The One.Night.Band will be performing at the Alte Schmiede in Vienna on the 22nd and 24th January and at Wein.Klang Sommer on the 17th July. The spring edition (8th May) will feature the Mia Zabelka Trio and in the Autumn (16th October) the ever-curious musician will collaborate with the ensemble "die reihe" under the motto "From Mind to Body".
For 2010 she has schedulded performances (in various configurations) in Milan, Berlin, Belgrade, London and at the Composers' Forum in Mittersill. Zabelka explains her philosophy: "I don't see crossover as a constructed confrontation between various different musical styles," - rather, she filters various genres, "in order to create a new language out of this concentrated material, my own, very specific means of communication."
WALTER TITZ
..."A trio of artists who could not be more different, protagonists of different generations, genders, backgrounds, approaches and ways of playing come together to work on the basis of a common improvisation that emerges between light, shadow and darkness"
"In Mia's Head" by Mia Zabelka and Zahra Mani (Mia's Factory, DER 019, Delphi Entertainment Records) is quoted and recommended in the charts "15 tracks to chill the spine when suffering from one too many midsummer hot flashes"
Festival: listening to the female cosmos
Using relatively conventional techniques, Mia Zabelka, electric violinist and vocalist and Katarina Matiasek , visual artist, achieved the strongest possible results.
The tortured man
Their audio-visual performance "Women of the Ruins" presented women in various situations ranging from war to other extremes, using montage and the negative imaging effects to transform extracts from archive material and feature films: our mothers and grandmothers, diligent women working in the ruins of war, who had to cope in a world of ration cards, a constant fear of death and the rubble of bombs on the "home front", whilst keeping the social system alive. Strong but criminal women in Iraq and India (brutal scenes with a man being tortured from the 1994 Biopic "Bandit Queen" about Phoolan Devi, a female Indian Robin Hood figure who was murdered in 2001).
And of course the events of the "German Autumn": Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof under arrest in Stammheim, Hanns Martin Schleyer's abduction and the hijacking of the Lufthansa plane "Landshut" (scenes from Heinrich Breloer's excellent feature documentary "Todesspiel", 1997). Zabelka spread her violin sounds enhanced by electronic effects through the silent film material, with threateningly growling basses and tender harmonics: an intense soundtrack.
Holy glaciality! Austrian avant-garde protagonist Mia Zabelka's newest work successfully combines elements of Thomas Köner's panoramic electronic freeze with Pauline Oliveros' (who also taught Zabelka) sub-atomic, abstract flute landscapes but also and more than anything else elements of body / sound explorations akin to American performance icons like Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. But the success has nothing to do with the pin-up factor of a woman with her electric violin - much more with the almost tender touch that pulls and distorts the crossing and changing tonalities through expanses of reverb. Head gliding as opposed to ear scratching. Apart from Fennesz, it's well-nigh impossible to find such perfectly minimalist shoe-gazing electronica, with the occasional bowed string or distorted voice modulation. Here with improvisation partners DJ Still, I Wolf, Zahra Mani and in a bonus video track mixed by Tina Frank with Dorit Chrysler and Electric Indigo. A double "Schönberg on the Beach", please!
Violinist Mia Zabelka has gone a step further following her experiments with the "One Night Band", surrounding herself on her new CD release with electronic musicians ranging from I-Wolf to Electric Indigo on synthesizers and Dorit Chrysler on the theremin. The musical collaborations create soundscapes where the notes pile up, get lost somewhere out there and come back again as an echo, oscillating and glittering in the brightest tones imaginable, conquering a new cosmos. This is how the future could sound, a couple of days after we've made contact with extra-terrestrial life forms. Mia Zabelka, whose electric violin playing is often described as anarchic, is far, far beyond most of the rest of us in her thoughts and in her music. Fantastic that we can already hear such music here on planet Earth. A hint: play the music as loud as possible to get the best out of the complexity of nuances.
The avant-garde violinist Mia Zabelka has launched a highly interesting electro-acoustic project, creating electronic music in a new and unconventional way in collaborations with various contemporary artists.
The violinist and composer Mia Zabelka has been engaged in the development of new improvisational techniques with her electric violin and voice for over 20 years. Zabelka is the type of musicians who sees genre-defined boundaries as static barriers that are there to be taken apart again. She describes her work as "automatic playing", which she derived from Friederike Mayröckers "automatic writing" and which simply means creating art "from and through the body". This approach enables the violinist to control and guide her improvisations in a new and more impulsive manner, without having to follow any fixed parameters or written musical laws. Thus her pieces wander the fine line between improvisation and composition, turning first this way, then that. The focal point of the artistic event are sonic experiments where the musician creates unbelievably intense and heavy soundscapes using computers and electronics which remain entirely listenable to despite their complexity.
The artist has gone a step further in her project "Mia's Factory" and has invited some of her musician friends to join her, each of them bringing their own individual approaches to music and ideas into the project. The starting point of this building together of various styles was Zabelka's sound material, which was recorded or used by each of the collaborating artists as a counterpart and basis of the compositional partnership. They proceeded to change, edit, mix and play with the material in a process of work in progress, with Zabelka and her partners mixing, editing and mastering each piece in a number of stages. Zabelka's partners in this exciting musical ping-pong game are DJ Still, Zahra Mani, I-Wolf, Electric Indigo, Dorit Chrysler, Martin Philadelphy and Tina Frank.
Zabelka, Mia & One.Night.Band
Embodiment
Mia Zabelka is a long-standing anarchist in Austria's music scene. The violinist and vocalist is not concerned with labels and pigeon holes and mixes all imaginable styles to a brew that defies categorisation. A pleasure to relish for all who love new sounds!
Mia Zabelka and her One.Night.Band are far from hermetic in their interpretation of the name-giving concept of their new project "Embodiment": Zabelka's concept of "automatic playing" derives from Friederike Mayröcker's "automatic writing", an artistic method of creating "from the body". This leads to a new type of improvisation based on impulse, rendering scores or programmes that define certain performance parameters unnecessary.
The result is exciting, as one would expect: refined in the selection of sound material, poised in the exploration of the various possibilities of playing together, the ensemble generates fabulously ornamented sonic rivers, flowing somewhere between heavy explosiveness and something just beyond the boundaries of perception.
Two electro-acoustic legends, Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Curran, also join Zabelka with great verve in a trio on one of the tracks.
"Embodiment" is the title of composer and electric violinist Mia Zabelka's new CD, a reference to her concept of "playing from the body", the immediate transformation of physical impulses into sound, which was influenced by Friederike Mayröcker's technique of "automatic writing". It might sound somewhat abstract on paper, but it sounds incredibly exciting on the CD: in various constellations, such as a trio with the American electronic dignitaries Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros, Zabelka creates broad and intense, sometimes orgiastic soundscapes that flow with a unique and delicate magic of their own.
2007 - 05 Tritonus University for Music & Performing Art in Vienna
Embodiment
The fleshy and skin-filled minimal artwork calls to mind the notion of embodiment. Whilst "Der Donner des Stillhaltens" remains fairly detached, only occasionally gathering into short intense summits and covering a wide-reaching arc of sonic suspense, "Der wachgerüttelte Rhythmus" confronts the listener with blocks of sound, resembling earthquakes and tremors. The body, whether as a sound body or human playing machine, is set into motion, vibrating and oscillating.
"Die Stimmen in deinem Kopf" is far more peaceful and comes closest to a conventional idea of melody, reflecting the inner observations of an external process that takes hold of and fissures the entire body. The associative possibilities are immense and there are no fix points apart from a single Mayröcker quotation. But fix points are not relevant to embodiment in the ether of new music.
