Over the course of 25 years Activity Center has developed a unique style of musical performance. Their distinctive way to “create spontaneous compositional structures” has been referred to as “improvised sound art” as well as “hand-played musique concrete”. Their long sold out double-CD ‘Moewen & Moos’ (1999) has been regarded as a milestone of it’s genre, while they have managed to build bridges between generations and allegedly also styles with their CD ‘Activity Center & Phil Minton’ in 2005. With ‘Lohn & Brot’, their most recent release from 2010, they have summed up their wide range of musical experience in electro-acoustic splendor. The Activity Center was founded in 1989 when post-war Germany stumbled into a new aera and post-punk finally felt worn out. Renkel and Beins played their first concert in the legendary Hannover underground club ‘Silke Arp bricht’, and their second one as part of a Guenter Christman ‘Vario’ project. After the duo had been the core of the ‘Hamburger Salon’ for a while it re-established itself within the freshly evolving Berlin Echtzeitmusik scene around 1995. Their Berlin version of the ‘2:13 Club’ at ‘Vollrads Tonsaal’ became a central meeting point of the so-called ‘Berlin Reductionism’ and it’s like-minded companions from London throughout the late 1990’s – at a time when this musical episode didn’t have any names yet. Activity Center gained some recognition for playing it’s idiosyncratic version of it and consequently became one of the original ingredients of the Berlin “all star group” Phosphor at the turn of the millennium and throughout the decade of the group’s existence.
Quiet Cue is proud to present Activity Center in it’s 26th year. – What will come next?
