HYBRID SESSIONS FEST 2025

After six years of regular monthly Hybrid Sessions evenings, a new format is born - a two-day festival that will offer the most lively, spontaneous and daring of the domestic and foreign improvisation scene.

Hybrid Sessions Fest 2025 It connects exceptional musical personalities, breaks down genre and geographical boundaries and creates space for unforgettable encounters that arise here and now — without a script, without guarantees, but with maximum commitment and joy.

German festival kicks off Contagious Trio (Andrea Neumann, Sabine Ercklentz, DJ Mieko Suzuki) to lead an improvisation workshop for musicians and female musicians across the experience. The evening then culminates in a joint performance by the trio with the workshop participants — whether on stage or in the audience, you will experience something that will never be repeated.

The next day will offer an exclusive concert evening with guests from Poland and Austria. All the performers meet on one stage, where together they create a new, unique sound. Final networking evening will open up space to meet, share inspiration and perhaps even give birth to future projects.

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🎶 PROGRAM 🎶

Wednesday, Sep 17, 2025

5PM-6:30PM Workshop Contagious trio (Andrea Neumann, Sabine Ercklentz and DJ Mieko Suzuki)

Admission is free upon the registration.

Andrea Neumann, a renowned German musician and composer with more than 30 years of experience in the field of experimental music, will lead a workshop for musicians and musicians together with other members of Contagious Trio. The open improvisation workshop will thus offer a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in their way of working and participate in a joint evening performance.

The workshop will focus on collective creation: how to create music with a specific profile with equal participation of all musicians, how to develop a personal vocabulary on their instruments and how to interact with it in a group, and how electronic and acoustic sources of sound can be combined and intermingled.

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20:00-22:00 Concert Contagious trio (DE) + workshop participants (E.0 Sál)

Berlin Contagious Trio is living proof that improvisation can be radical, sensitive and monumental at the same time. It brings together three distinctive personalities of experimental music — DJ and sound artist Mieko Suzuki, pianist Andrea Neumann and trumpeter Sabine Ercklentz — to create a sound world in which the boundaries between instrument, electronics and composition blur.

Contagious Trio's music moves to the border between avant-garde improvisation and electronic music, emphasizing the element of surprise, immediate reactions and sonic depth. Neumann uses his handcrafted “inside piano”, whose feedback processes flow into Suzuki's effects system, which works with pre-prepared sounds, turntable loops and live mixing. The Sabine Ercklentz tube's live inputs are also connected to the same system, whose fragmented signals add tension and urgency to the sound.

Together they create futuristic sound structures that are built on fragile textures and impulses, but the result is monumental. Contagious Trio's music isn't just about sound — it's real-time communication, an intuitive composition that never sounds twice the same.

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Thursday, Sept 18, 2025

7pm-9pm Hybrid Sessions special: Paulina Ovczarek (Poland), Didi Kern (Austria) and Burkhard Stangl (Austria)

Paulina Owczarek is a saxophonist born in 1985 in Zduńska Woli. He plays alto and baritone saxophone. He is mainly engaged in free improvised music and contemporary chamber music. She also works as a translator of improvisational literature. She is the initiator and founder of the Kraków Improvisation Orchestra, in which she plays and conducts a group of improvising musicians. Within the Institute of Intuition (with Tomko Chołoniewski, Michał Dymny and Rafal Mazur), he practices free improvisation at regular concerts with invited improvisational guests.

She participated in projects of the Kraków improvised music scene (KN Free Jazz, Muzykoterapia, LaBint, Open Session), performances combining improvised dance and music (Free the Dance, Traces of threads, Shreds). He is also involved in activities on the borderlands of improvised music and painting, pantomime, film and poetry (New Secret Detective, Clutched Around Your Mouth, Station, Same Same, Scent of Human Clothes, Music Is My Plane). She has been active in the bands Tajny, OCHO, LANZA, OCD, MI65, Uncharted Territory, Elder Space Bankers, Monopium, and the Satoko Fujii Orchestra. She has worked with the London Improvisers Orchestra, Kraków's Teatr Stary and Kraków Opera.

Didi Kern is a prominent figure in the Viennese underground scene. He started playing drums as a child in a marching band — he has since traveled a path that has taken him into many musical worlds. He is known as a member of bands Fuckhead, Bulbul, Broken.Heart.Collector or the Slovak project Shibuya Motors. His musical range ranges from hard noise rock to free improvisation. He has collaborated with a number of figures of the world avant-garde scene, such as Peter Brotzmann, Ken Vandermark, Mats Gustafsson or Walter Weasel (The Flying Luttenbachers). In jazz, noir and improvisation, he moves with the absolute confidence and relentless energy that makes him one of the most distinctive drummers of the Central European scene.

Burkhard Stangl is a music composer and musician currently living in Vienna. Playing primarily guitar and electronics, he is a prolific performer in the world of electroacoustic improvisation and has participated in more than 50 recordings. One of his best-known recordings is schnee, a duet with Cristof Kurzmann, inspired by four films and a quote by writer Robert Walser.

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‍9pm-10pm Networking

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Media Partner: Czech Radio Jazz