Description
Nimikry - this name, which originally signifies organic imitation and camouflage, but is here alienated by the initial "N," stands for Alessandro Baticci and Rafal Zalech. They are both composers and instrumentalists - Baticci plays the flute, Zalech the viola; both have studied at the MDW - the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, and display a marked affinity for live electronics, which has made them inventors and entrepreneurs.
For Baticci and Zalech, working on new, highly sensitive digital interfaces with their traditional instruments became an aesthetic imperative. Especially since, as interpreters, they had always felt restricted by the performative and fine-motor limits imposed by the then available live electronics. Now their work is aimed at the quintessence of music making, organically linking the individual micro- and macroscopic configuration of sound via their own bodies with the digital domain, thus overcoming the old barriers.
In live electronics, a gentle pizzicato can trigger swirling bass sounds or strident high delay chains. The relationship between a resonating body and sound, between a resonating body and the performer, and between audience, resonating body and performer, are thus significantly expanded, at the same time they become more difficult to apprehend.
Material from their live sets, in which composition and improvisation mutually contaminate each other, will often form the 10 basis for a larger composition. Just like, for instance, in the concerto grosso Bird of Paradise (2020- 2021) for ensemble and digitalised strings, written for Klangforum Wien, which took its inspiration from the coda of their Necromancy-Set from 2019. On the occasion of this carnivalesque-chimerical trip rife with disguises and deceptions, Klangforum Wien's whole string section was turned into smart instruments.
