t=0)))
2025
Sound performance
30’
t=0))) is a sound performance in which the temporary room ambience is recorded, played back and transformed. At the start of the performance, the room ambience is captured live in a very short and quiet moment. The recorded and frozen sound of the room is amplified and immediately played back into the room, making the silence audible and creating a soft noise layer that consists of the sound spectrum present at that moment and the self-noise of the microphone itself. This process of freezing the present sound and extending it is repeated over and over again, creating multiple layers of noise, resonances and feedback tones. The drone evolves and blends past and present sounds, inviting the listeners to slow down and connect with the sonic timespace.
Photos: Vanessa Hüpin
Resting on Withered Laurels
2025
Piece for horn, violin, viola and double bass
9’30“
Thomas Adrian Mittler - horn
Giorgos Panagiotidis - violin
Megumi Kasakawa - viola
Paul Cannon - double bass
The idea for this piece comes from my association of the horn with its
historical role as a signaling instrument. Often used to convey victory,
alarm, or command - shaping sound into calls that carried power,
urgency, and presence - the horn has long been bound to notions of
heroism, the hunt and conquest. Opposed to these loud, attention-
seeking calls, Resting on Withered Laurels sounds calm and restrained.
The horn doesn’t take the lead as a solo instrument, but instead
becomes part of an ensemble that is connected with each other and
the space. Here, the instruments slowly move and softly sound
together. They don’t aim to impose or impress, but to express gentle
and fragile voices of care and interconnection. In between they rest -
letting go and opening a space to listen and breathe. On the withered
laurels of triumph and prestige, unheard voices quietly bloom.
Written in 2025 for Ensemble Modern as part of the IYCA Ticino.
Pupa
2024
Sound performance
55'
Matthias Müller - concept, composition, performance
Paulo Amendoeira - performance
Zhuoni Li - performance
Lisa Mark - performance
Takuma Miyai - performance
Arthur Holliger - audio recording, camera director
Beat Müller - sound technician
A pupa appears to be motionless and yet a transformation takes place. But how can a transformation be active and passive at the same time?
Pupa interweaves musical, scenographic, installative and performative elements. The duality of active and passive is challenged by blending performative actions with listening pieces and blurring the lines between subject and object, doing and doing nothing as well as sound and silence.
Empty Rooms
2023
Sound installation
Bare speakers, various containers from everyday life, multichannel amplifier, audio recordings of the empty containers
In the installation Empty Rooms, different containers that can be found in everyday life are distributed on the floor of the room to create many small rooms inside one big room. The containers contain nothing except one small speaker that plays a recording of the emptied and silent inside of the container. The resulting sound is a mixture of the resonance of the container along with the quiet electronic self-noise from the microphone, the recording device and the noise that remains in the room itself.
Photos: Stella R.K. Spinedi
softly, the threads of night whisper
2023
Piece for piano, percussion, cd player and ventilator
12'
Alba Llorach Roca - piano
Alberto Anhaus - percussion
Róza Radnóti - video projection
A recording of the night, taken at a quiet place near the performance venue. Twelve minutes of nightly silence burned onto a CD. What remains is noise:
The soft noise of a street, the wind, water pipes or ventilation systems. But sometimes, a tone may appear, pulled out like a thread from the dimmed sound of the night, whispering in the muted dark.
The piece was written for the project Nightshifts, a collaboration between musicians from Salzburg and Bern.
Photos: Christian Schneider
Video: Mozarteum University
soft grounds
2023
Performative audio play
15'
Matthias Müller - concept, composition, performance
José del Avellanal - narration
soft grounds is about the perception and exploration of things, places and grounds inside a single square. It tells of the search for orientation and connections in a geometric world with an infinite number of points, lines, surfaces and volumes.
With texts and ideas from Jorge Luis Borges, Vilém Flusser, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Benedict Spinoza, Alfred North Whitehead, Donna Haraway, Kae Tempest a.o.
Pneuma
2023
Piece for an airbed and a person
12'14"
Airbed and human are sounding bodies that breathe.
Video: Luz González
Breathing I/O
2022
Sound installation
Organ pipes, tubes, air compressor
