Hans Essel

Based in Darmstadt, Essel (born 1948) works in improvised music and what he calls Grundlagenmusik — foundational or elemental music — exploring the most reduced conditions under which sound can still constitute a musical act. His project Saitensack uses unmodified, unamplified violin and viola to push the instruments toward their physical limits, producing tones that resist conventional classification. A second project, Zeitfalten, routes tape through a Revox A77 reel machine so that each recorded sound plays back nine seconds later, folding time into audible accumulation. He has played with the group ARGO, formed in Darmstadt in 1985.