Etienne Nillesen // Nate Wooley, Chris Corsano & Ches Smith

Etienne Nillesen is a Cologne-based composer and sound artist whose work explores the harmonic possibilities of the snare drum.
His music treats sound not as a sequence of events, but as a spatial and sculptural phenomenon that unfolds through resonance, duration and perception. Listening becomes an embodied experience, characterized by space, acoustics and sustained attention.
Using two specially tuned snare drums, Nillesen explores overtones, interference patterns and subtle transformations, allowing the sound to slowly evolve and reveal its inner relationships over time.
The performances invite the audience to a concentrated listening situation in which small changes in sound and perception open up an immersive world of sound. The concert will be the release concert for his new solo album TWEE.

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After a decade of conceptually oriented bands such as Mutual Aid Music and knknighgh, trumpeter Nate Wooley founded the trio Folk Music to return to pure improvisation. He asked two of his favorite colleagues, percussionists Chris Corsano and Ches Smith, to join him, with the only rules being flexibility and spontaneity. The result is an improvisational trio that can produce both delicate sensibilities and massive monoliths of sound.

Nate Wooley (born 1974) was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, and began playing trumpet professionally at the age of thirteen with his father, a big band saxophonist. He made his debut as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at the opening series of the 2019 season. Wooley is considered one of the pioneers of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn and has gained international recognition for his idiosyncratic trumpet language.

Chris Corsano (b. 1975, USA) is a New York-based drummer who has been working at the intersection of collective improvisation, free jazz, avant-rock and experimental music since the late 1990s. He is the preferred rim-batterer for some of the greatest contemporary representatives of "jazz" (Joe McPhee, Paul Flaherty, Mette Rasmussen, Zoh Amba) and "rock" (Sir Richard Bishop, Bill Orcutt, Jim O'Rourke) as well as for artists who cannot be categorized (Björk for her album "Volta" and her world tour, Michael Flower, Okkyung Lee).

Originally from Sacramento, California, Ches Smith is a drummer, percussionist and composer based in New York. Since the early 2000s, he has collaborated with a wide variety of artists across many genres, including Marc Ribot, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Darius Jones, David Torn, John Tchicai, Nels Cline, Mary Halvorson, Trevor Dunn, Terry Riley, Kris Davis, Dave Holland, Secret Chiefs 3, Xiu Xiu, Good for Cows, Theory of Ruin and Mr. Bungle.