by Diego Chamy & Vered Nethe
The "Trio Sowari", formed by Burkhard Beins (percussion & objects), Bertrand Denzler (tenor saxophone) and Phil Durrant (laptop), proposed "27 Questions for a Start" as a starting point for a discussion between different artists and theorists, which took place in the opening of the Labor Diskurs series at KuLe, Berlin, on November 11, 2007.
Because of the fact that Beins, Denzler and Durrant are musicians devoted mostly to the so-called improvised music, their questions are mainly referring to this way of making music. However, the problems that they present are likely to be also present within other ways of producing contemporary music.
Now: even though 1) it was clear for us that these twenty-seven questions were only meant to be a starting point in order to think about shared problematics between musicians and theorists around the contemporary music scene, and 2) knowing that they were not supposed to be strictly answered (since it’s clear that their power relies on the fact that they are questions), we - since the discussion at KuLe was in German and our German was not good at that moment - decided to take the questions literally and find out what could happen if we give them an answer. The result is here.