Jacek Chmiel & Lara Süß are the collective Meandertale. The two started collaborating in 2019. They are both musicians and visual artists alike and are looking for different artistic forms to express themselves. Mainly they concentrated on a musical collaboration with special focus on the conscious perception of silence and its framing using minimalistic sounds. They work sensitively with sound fusion, differentiation as well as with structuring of time and timelessness. Due to their alternate biographical experiences the artistic expression they are creating becomes alive.
Music:
https://antennanongrata.bandcamp.com/album/meandertale-obssesions
https://synergeticsonance.bandcamp.com/album/weltschmerz
Biographies:
Lara Süß works with different art forms. She studied music and movement, she is a vocalist, a classical singer as well as a free improviser and used to perform as an actress as well. Currently she is member of different ensembles, such as the poetry ensemble StimmSpiel and she
develops her own music theatre pieces. She performed in many different European cities, e.g. Copenhagen, Berlin, Hamburg, Basel, Vienna and Brussels.
Jacek Chmiel is a sound artist, field recordist and improviser playing synthesizers, zither, electronics, singing bowls and objects. His deepest interest in sound is to look for new ways to embed all the possibilities of an ever changing electro-acoustic setup in order to reinvent his way of thinking at every second. Being connected to the time, space and layers created by all the sounds he produces, both as a physical fact as well as abstract peculiarities, he delivers a strong, yet delicate and touching, musicality. He graduated MA degree in jazz guitar which was followed by living two years in Nepal where he was the head of the guitar department in Kathmandu Jazz Conservatory. Then he moved to Switzerland and graduated with a MA degree in improvisation in Musik Akademie of Basel studying with Andrea Neumann, Alfred Zimmerlin and Fred Frith.
About:
Meandertale feels like the aural equivalent of looking through a microscope—the details you don’t hear with the naked ear, suddenly stark and in focus. Or like setting foot on an alien planet and taking the first few cautious steps into an unrecognizable landscape. The sound world that Jacek and Lara inhabit is fascinating, fearless, intrepid—it can feel equally like the beginning or the end of time, the first chapter or the last. From this point of view it’s also disconcerting, since it up-ends whatever sense we may have nurtured about narrative, and steers us remorselessly into a kind of non-dramatic continuous present. And yet we know something remarkable is going on, something we will want to re-visit, re-experience, re-consider. Unique and compelling. Chapeau! Fred Frith
Whatever you do, don’t expect to hear tunes, or lyrics in the commonly accepted sense of the word. You may find emotions expressed. You will be hearing sounds, or noise, as this Meandertale is much more akin to that of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. You may find yourself swept away by the riverrun, into the most baffling, oblique, outrageous and rambling meandertale in anybody’s lexicography.
Enjoy. Ken Cheetham