Making the inaudible audible, developing sonic visions, creating surreal soundscapes: since 2000, artists Andrea Ermke and Annette Krebs have been blending field recordings with instrumentally played sounds. Where prepared guitars were initially used, Annette Krebs’ self-designed and built instruments – so-called ‘constructions’ – have now found their place. Ermke contributes field recordings, which she plays back via minidisc. These two heterogeneous, idiosyncratic playing styles never collide, but rather fuse into soundscapes in which the digitally generated and processed sounds cannot be distinguished from the (analogue) acoustic ones. The worlds of sound that emerge from this in the live performance oscillate between concreteness and surrealism.

Andrea Ermke (born 1971) is a pioneer of real-time music in Berlin. As early as 1999, she turned to field recordings and sampling techniques, combining them with minidisc players and mixing desks to create an unusual style that results in radical-sounding sound collages. She regularly releases records, most recently a live recording from the eighth Spontaneous Music Festival (together with Anaïs Tuerlinckx and Jonas Engel) in 2025.

Annette Krebs also lives and works in Berlin. Having moved away from her ‘original instrument’, the guitar, she has played a special role in the experimental improvisation and sound experimentation scene since 2013 with her electroacoustic assemblages, dubbed ‘Konstruktion’ (construction). Her work has been invited and promoted by various institutions (including the Academy of Arts, the Goethe Institute and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris).