Echtzeitmusik Berlin

Shaped by the perspectives of participants and various observers, the book Echtzeitmusik Berlin – Self-Defining a Scene investigates, documents, and reflects on a multilayered phenomenon within Berlin’s musical culture, a phenomenon whose influence and meaning has effects that extend far beyond Berlin itself. Having emerged in the open spaces of the city’s east side after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and rooted in a cultural coordinate system made up of squats and free improvisation, punk and New Music, social experimentation and performance art, the Echtzeitmusik scene has passed through an eventful history of musical and social development and matured into a wide spectrum of predominantly experimental forms of music, bordering on fields as varied as noise, electronica, trash pop, free jazz, and contemporary composed music, not to mention performance and sound art.
This book is a theoretical approach to a scene that constituates itself through practice, that describes itself with every single contribution here, that invents, defines, and positions itself through writing. It is a verbal act of uncovering. There is not the history, but a myriad of histories, not the theory, but the widest range of somewhat discordant conceptions and approaches. Echtzeitmusik – Self-Defining a Scene mirrors this multiperspectivity. It is more than a mere documentation of the history of Echtzeitmusik, it might be considered a part of this history.