This time I was with singer/songwriter and experimental composer Stepha Schweiger from Berlin. One of her most recent works, called The Mark On The Wall, is a music theatre work based on a text by Virginia Woolf, and deals with a lot of the themes that we discuss, such as the overarching importance of memory in music and the arts, her place in the world as a female composer, and the important roles played by the people that influence us throughout our lives, especially those who have died.

In 1993 Stepha Schweiger created her first experimental music theatre commissioned by the Berlin Senate. Amongst other experiences, she completed a one year course at the Ircam in Paris and at the Institute of Sonology, Conservatory of the Hague. In 2017 her 100-minutes-long music theatre work “The Mark On The Wall”, based on the story of the same name by Virginia Woolf from 1917, was created in London and Berlin, followed by a performance in Ulm in April 2018. With her band “Girl On Catfish” studio recordings were done in 2018.

Like the previous episode, this interview was recorded in the corner of a large, empty gallery room, so there’s a lot of echo but it creates a somewhat fitting sonic environment.

The music you’ll hear throughout this episode comes from various releases of Stepha’s and shows the large variety of genres and sounds that this composer enjoys exploring:

1) Frango Phragmon Extended – Klangereignis Pur (Stepha Schweiger komponiert visionmusique)

2) Dissolve Into – Dissolve Into

3) Ver-blich 5 – Klangereignis Pur (Stepha Schweiger komponiert visionmusique)

4) Wooden Leg – upcoming release. (Stepha Schweiger:  voc and piano, Hanno Leichtmann: electronics,  Katherine Mansfield: lyrics)

You can find out more about this genre-defying composer at stepha.net.

If you’ve enjoyed this discussion, you can find more on my website, where I’ll be regularly uploading new episodes. You can also download the episodes on iTunes by searching Echo Chamber.

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Bye.