Ignaz Schick

Ignaz Schick (*1972 in Trostberg/Oberbayern) is a Berlin based sound artist, composer & visual artist. He also performs as an instrumentalist on turntables, objects, live-electronics, alto/baritone saxophone & flutes.

In his youth he studied the saxophone and performed in free jazz and avant rock bands. At the same time he was getting obsessed with multitrack tape machines, record players and effect boxes and he started experimenting with many different instruments and sound making devices. After college he briefly studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and worked for several years as an assistant for contemporary composer Josef Anton Riedl. Since 1995 he lives & works in Berlin where he became an active and integral force of the so-called Berlin Nouvelle Vague and the blossoming "experimental" music scene. He has been also prolific as curator (Festival für Andere Musik, Erase & Reset, Time Shifts, TITO, Echtzeitmusiktage 2010, Flux Festival 2018, Fuchsfest 2021, REFLUX Festival of Contemporary Electro-Acoustic Music 2022, ...) and runs the experimental music label Zarek.

Ignaz Schick has toured worldwide solo or with groups like Perlonex, Phosphor, Berlin Sound Connective, Nighthawk Kitchen, Tree People, Splitter Orchestra or ILOG. He has released music on several labels like Absinth, Astral Spirits, Charhizmha, Irrah, Le Petit Mignon, Mikroton, Non Visual Objects, Potlatch, Staalplaat and his own imprint Zarek and collaborated worldwide with more than a hundred international sonic artists - amongst others with such greats as Mwata Bowden, John Butcher, Don Cherry, Douglas R. Ewart, Limpe Fuchs, Sven-Åke Johansson, George Lewis, Toshimaru Nakamura, Charlemagne Palestine, Andrea Parkins, Keith Rowe, Akira Sakata, Matthias Spahlinger or Martin Tetreault.

Since 2012 he mainly focusses on conceptual composition and experimental radio pieces. In parallel he has started several new projects with a younger generation of Berlin experimentalists (Yemen Breakfast, Radio Nightmares, Hawking, Overdue, KUDU, ILOG, ...). He also frequently collaborates with Nick Dunston, Achim Kaufmann, Christian Lillinger, Rieko Okuda or Harri Sjöström and has founded the 12-piece workshop ensemble Circuit Training which focusses on the realization of conceptual graphic & verbally instructed scores.

He has received various composition, travel & research stipends/grants for Paris, South-East-Asia, Los Angeles & Istanbul for writing new pieces and researching the local scenes. Amongst others he received the prestigious composition fellowships at Villa Aurora (2017) & Kulturakademie Tarabya Istanbul (2018). Schick took part in several exhibitions and showed a larger selection of his audio/visual works in a solo exhibition at Schauraum K3 in Bavaria (2019) and at the Berlin based project space Liebig12 in 2021. In 2022 besides several festival appearances he had a two month sound art residency at Sonoscopia Porto, organized & co- curated REFLUX Festival of Contemporary Electro-Acoustic Music in Berlin and focussed on the large scale research project City Sound Kolkata in collaboration with Goethe Institue Kolkata/India which involved a month of research in April followed by a month of production and workshop in November finally resulting in a four and a half hour durational concert installation in January 2023 involving 7 local musicians from different sonic scenes. Since February 2023 Schick is traveling all around India researching and collaborating with different experimental musicians and sound artists in Goa, Kochi, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Delhi to name a few cities.

"Ignaz Schick is a busy man. Along with running the Zarek label, he’s a vanguard of European improvisation. (...) Schick plays vaguely enough “electronics”, which take to mean feedback inducers, samplers, buzzers, hissers, and miscealleneous noisemakers.
Ignaz Schick does an admirable job of contributing to the slew of mind-expanding music coming out of Europe. Zarek is a label to watch, and (...) essential for fans of creative new music." 

Nirav Soni, Ink 19 

"Ignaz Schick has surprised me with every release of late, becoming increasingly prolific in the areas of new improvisation and electro-acoustic music."
 
Richard di Santo, Incursion Music Review, Canada

"The Berlin scene has fascinatingly burgeoned in recent times, and much of the city’s developing electro-acoustic improv activity centres around or to some extent visibly involves Ignaz Schick. His electronics have featured on a series of releases which all document an intriguing probing of the improvisational interface between acoustic instruments and electronically- and computer-generated sounds" 

Nick Cain, Opprobrium (UK)