KAI FAGASCHINSKI: The Evil of Banality (clarinet quartet)

GUEST ARTIST #4

Kai Fagaschinski: The Evil of Banality (clarinet quartet) – Sound Installation

A string quartet turned inside out, an encircling swarm, a synchronized swimming choreography. Let these three analogies be offered as a prelude to general confusion. A focus in my musical practice is the between-the-tones, or rather the emerging third element between two sounds – not merely, or not only, as a poetic experience, but also as a very concrete and physical sonic phenomenon in space and ear. The event-space of beatings and difference tones did not unfold for me from theory, but from initially highly astonished, practical and experimental music-making experience. Usually, I work together with similarly or complementarily minded colleagues. In the psycho-acoustic context, I should highlight my long-standing duos The International Nothing with clarinetist Michael Thieke, and Los Glissandinos with Klaus Filip on sine waves. Only recently has an interest awakened in me to develop sonic scenarios compositionally or conceptually on my own as well. Here I’m interested not in the soloistic aspect, but explicitly in the dynamics between sounds. Since my compositional imagination has its limits, I stick to my instrument and, specifically in focus with The Evil of Banality, to the familiar and personal sonic language. The string quartet serves me as a fascinating model for a multilayered musical unity. Through the spatial spreading of this unity – the four sound sources play from the four corners of the room – a clearer and more transparent experience emerges of the relationships and movements of sounds toward, with, and against each other through space. The density and similarity of the sounds, in turn, sometimes blurs this web of relationships into a diffuse swarm. The long, and often seemingly electronic, tonal progressions are repeatedly interrupted in a very human way by brief, deliberately coordinated moments of emergence and breathing. All sorts of playful games can be performed with aspects of sound phenomena and sound projections. Perhaps one could even say that such effects can be downright seductive for the moment, but in the long run don’t always necessarily prove to fill an evening. So how does one find a musical form? For me, despite all my love for the abstract and sound-as-such, it’s always also about shaping a subtle narrative. Thus, for my little psychedelic road trip, the term ‘science fiction’ seems to me a quite apt attribution. I wish you an exciting listening experience! P.S.: With the premiere of the quartet, I’m simultaneously presenting my new double album ‘Aerodynamics’ (Ni Vu Ni Connu), which contains a clarinet octet composition and a nonet conception, each representing direct precursor works to The Evil of Banality.

[Kai Fagaschinski, Berlin, September 2025]