Launching a new “Reflektor” series of short festivals, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie invited Bryce Dessner to curate two days of concerts. Published on Bachtrack.

After Jonathan Meese's Parsifal staging was rejected by Bayreuth, he channelled his frustrations into an "arch-Parsifal" which shoots the titular hero into space, with a musical re-imagining of Wagner’s score by Austrian composer Bernhard Lang. Published on Bachtrack.

Scores, a recent exhibition in Berlin, exhibited new ‘scores’ by four visual artists as artworks in themselves, alongside a series of concerts featuring their musical realisation. Published on The Cusp.

Joseph Beuys, the German avant-garde artist and environmentalist, died 30 years ago this year. To mark his anniversary, Soloistenensemble Kaleidoskop mounted the premiere of a new surrealist theatrical work. Published on The Cusp.

Stasis, originally written for Ensemble musikFabrik, explores the boundary between sound and silence through a kind of symphony in space. Last weekend, the Ensemblekollektiv performed a new tailor-made version for the Akademie der Künste building in Berlin. Published on Bachtrack.

Round the corner from the Bundestag in Berlin, seat of the German parliament, the Akademie der Künste is mounting a new exhibition of works responding not only to migration, but also to exile, occupation, division and alienation. Published on The Cusp.

This former brewery in East Berlin was the home to a three-day celebration of weird and wonderful musical machines. The Wir sind die Roboter festival featured an array of instrumental contraptions from across the globe, with installations and exhibitions accompanied by three nights of musical performances. Published on The Cusp.

The idea of using smells in art isn’t new, but its history isn’t particularly illustrious. Smell-o-Vision was voted one of the hundred worst ideas of all time; Scratch’n’Sniff didn’t fare much better. Osmodrama, a two-month festival in Berlin, was not deterred. Published on The Cusp.

Nico and the Navigators are a Berlin-based theatrical ensemble describing themselves as ‘full body poets’, using music, dance and physical comedy in their evocative and often improvised avant-garde works. The hour that we knew too much of each other is the ensemble's bleakly humorous look at life and love in the time of over-communication and social media. Published on The Cusp.

At a disused public transport depot in an unfashionable district of Berlin, Taiwanese choreographer Shang-Chi Sun and chamber group Ensemble KNM Berlin presented spur, a new dance-and-music work based on the music of Austrian composer, Beat Furrer. Published on The Cusp.

Hidden in a small bunker under a quiet apartment block in Berlin, ausland has acted as an incubator for the city’s experimental and improvised music scene for over ten years. For this performance, local echzeitmusik (literally: real-time music) artists joined touring Portuguese musicians for a performance with their sonic installation project, the Phonopticon. Published on The Cusp.

Since 2006 the Blurred Edges festival has been drawing connections between disparate scenes of contemporary music in Hamburg over two weeks each summer. Published on The Cusp.