Thomas Lehn & Marcus Schmickler

The Graham Foundation

Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Chicago, Illinois 60610

Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler have worked together since 1998. In their long musical collaboration, they confront intrinsically different instruments—for Thomas, modular synthesizer, and for Marcus, computer—with a common understanding of real-time composition and a shared admiration for subtle degrees of musical intensity.

For Lampo, the analog-digital duo premieres Prediction Control Allocation—a three-part improvisation and a new performance strategy, with each section exploring a different musical form. Lehn and Schmickler take their cue from Point Line Cloud by composer and researcher Curtis Roads, while referencing the formal ideas of Stockhausen, Xenakis and Ligeti. Sounds scatter, fuse and then mutate, as they flow into other sounds.

Thomas Lehn (b.1958, Fröndenberg, Germany) has been working as a performer, interpreter, composer and improviser of contemporary music since the early 1980s. Rooted in the experience of a wide spectrum of musical fields and based on his background as a pianist, he has developed an individual ‘language’ of electronic music. The electronic equipment he uses consists of analog synthesizers from the late 1960s, particularly the EMS Synthi A. The specific character of this modular instrument allows him to act and react spontaneously in close contact with the various structural degrees of the musical process.

Marcus Schmickler (b.1968, Cologne, Germany) studied composition and electronic music and works in both composed and improvised forms. He has won numerous prizes and honors and is closely associated with the Cologne label a-Musik. As a composer along with his many works of electronic music, he works with the ensemble recherche, the Staatskapelle Weimar, the musikFabrik, the Paragon Ensemble, the Ensemble Zeitkratzer, among others. As a musician he works with artists such as John Tilbury, Thomas Lehn, MIMEO and Julee Cruise. His discography consists of over 50 titles, and he has performed internationally. He lives and works in Cologne.

Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler performed at Lampo in September 2005, later released on Navigation Im Hypertext (a-Musik). Lehn’s Lampo debut dates back to May 2003. Schmickler has performed several times in the Lampo series, first in September 2002 and most recently in March 2014.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation; support provided by the Goethe-Institut Chicago