Les Femmes Savantes (D/S/ARG)

Les Femmes Savantes
A network of learned ladies
Five female musicians from Berlin, appearing in changing constellations are calling themselves Les femmes savantes. Andrea Neumann, Ana Maria Rodriguez, Ute Wassermann, Sabine Ercklentz and Hanna Hartman originate from Germany, Argentina and Sweden. In their labyrinthine network they combine the most diverse facets of new music, improvisation, sound art, electronics and jazz. The group takes its name from Molière’s character comedy of 1672. The “learned ladies” are not much concerned with marriage and prefer instead to mix in artistic and scientific circles. Molière’s ladies don’t come out well from being captivated by the pompous and turgid phrases of third-class poets and philologists; this choice of name therefore involved a healthy dash of irony.
What the five artists have in common is working with sound and its disposition in space, and this from completely different perspectives: Hanna Hartman (sound art) collects recordings from widely varying sources, then removes and abstracts them from their context in order newly to recombine them, Andrea Neumann (inside piano and electronics), Sabine Ercklentz (trumpet and electronics) and Ute Wassermann (voice) concentrate upon instrumental and vocal sounds which are electroacoustically “extended”. They bring with them a rich spectrum of noises, extreme frequencies and colours… Ana Maria Rodriguez (composition and live electronics) integrates the vocal and instrumental sounds of her colleagues, using flitering systems which are simultaneously refined and subversive, into her own composition language.
Nina Forst