Stumbling Towards Equilibrium

Ellen Arkbro & the London Crumhorn Consort, Lukas De Clerck

Still getting my bearings straight as the year begins—sometimes it’s hard to focus when the world seems headed into abyss. But hang tight, there’s more to come.

CTM Festival: Ancient in the Future

Although the annual CTM Festival—which launches its 27^th edition on Friday, January 23 and runs through February 1—began as a celebration of electronic music, over the years it has broadened its scope to present a wide range of styles. Still, electronic disciplines remain its heart. But two of the most promising performances happening this coming week are built around instruments that enjoyed their heyday either centuries or millennia ago, and have only sparingly been heard in modern times, if at all.

Ellen Arkbro

Ellen Arkbo (photo: Victoria Loeb)

At Radialsystem on Saturday, January 24 Ellen Arkbro will present a new work written for the London Crumhorn Consort, an ensemble devoted to the titular instrument—a double reed from the Renaissance with a hooked shape similar to an umbrella handle. The instrument comes in various sizes according to pitch and due to its limited range it was typically played in ensembles; it functions a bit like a bagpipe chanter. Its resurrection began in the 1960s during the early music revival, with David Munrow’s influential Early Music Consort of London among the groups bringing back the instrument. Below you can see and hear a clip by Munrow’s group playing the 1617 Johann Hermann Schein piece “Padouana (Banchetto Musicale),” where the tightly clustered harmony produces a buzzing richness.

Arkbro’s piece features three different crumhorns along with another ancient instrument, the regal, a portable bellows-powered organ also from the Renaissance era, although the model Arkbro will play is electric. She shared a MIDI version of the composition with me and it reflects her deep, ongoing engagement with unusual harmonies. It’s easy to understand the appeal of the crumhorn given her strong connection with the organ. As the above Schein performance reveals, a crumhorn ensemble almost suggests a group of individual organ pipes. She writes of the piece:

The music draws on the uniquely shaped texture of the instrument’s rich spectrum and resonance, and through precisely tuned intervals and chords, in 7-limit just intonation, the sound of the instruments blend with reed organ and create stable architectural blocks, almost like a synthesizer. The sound brings the listener’s attention to the delicate rawness of the in-tune sound and harmony as texturality.

The challenge of the performance is for the instrumentalists to control these relatively unwieldy devices on a piece requiring intense pitch precision to fully realize the kind of euphoric buzz audible in the demo version, and the composer’s awareness of that difficulty is part of the process, of which she says, “Somehow it’s in that tension that the soul of the music is found - in the striving for something unreachable.”

The Arkbro performance at Radialsystem follows a new work by Sarah Davachi titled “Double Reeds,” a solo organ piece accompanied by a new film made by Dicky Bahto.

Lukas De Clerck

The Brussels-based musician Lukas De Clerck performs at Radialsystem on Monday, January 26, performing on an instrument of his own design, Telescopic Aulos of Atlas. In 2019 De Clerck was experimenting with a project that sought to use “pumps, tubes and ropes to remotely activate a variety of flutes and percussion scattered across the performance space,” as Antonio Poscic wrote in a Wire magazine story on the musician in April of 2025. In the process the musician came across a video clip of Max Brumberg, a France-based flutist who began building new iterations of the instrument in 2017, using old archaeological renderings as a guide. De Clerck connected with him and spent five inspiring days digging into the instruments Brumberg had built. The experience led to an ongoing engagement with the aulos. He began conducting his own research and building new iterations of the instrument. In the years since he’s released a number of beguiling recordings, both as Bloedneus & de Snuitkever and under his own name, including the acclaimed 2024 album The Telescopic Aulos Of Atlas (Ideologic Organ).

Lukas De Clerck (photo: Emile Barret)

Obviously there are no recordings of ancient aulos music, so any contemporary performances are either sketchy simulations or, in the case of De Clerck, speculative versions, a practice he’s taken further by using metal rather than traditional wooden ones. The pipes of his Telescopic Aulos of Atlas can slide to elongate or shorten their length, which naturally impacts pitch, particularly with the application of circular breathing. Additional control is provided by angling the pipes upward or toward the ground. In his liner notes, De Clerck explains:

To play the Telescopic Aulos of Atlas is to master the act of balancing. Tubes slide in and out of each other, and both hands are occupied holding the instrument. The instrument is tilted skywards to counter the pulling force, with gravity pushing it downwards. This ensures the reeds are kept in place precisely but loosely to apply the correct embouchure.

While some of his earlier recordings revealed a very loose connection of Renaissance music, the material on his latest record breaks entirely with the past, forging an intense harmonically thorny drone music. De Clerck wears a leather strap around his face called a phorbeia, which helps stabilize the two reeds in his mouth. There’s a harsh saxophonic quality to some of his playing, but the way the two tones collide and blend, spewing clouds of overtones and lacerating harmonies carves out an entirely new space. You can hear the shrill dance of his instrument below on “The Cats of Medir.”

De Clerck shares the bill with a new project from Swedish composer and saxophonist Dror Feiler, who’s spending the year in Berlin through a DAAD residency. His NO Orchestra features an impressive line-up including Berliners Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Boris Baltschun, and Laure Boer and several Swedes such as Mats Lindstrom, the studio director of EMS in Stockholm. They’ll perform a new piece called “No IS.”

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

January 20, Ensemble KNM Berlin play Leonid Hrabovsky, Ying Wang, Rebecca Saunders, Beat Furrer, Daniela Terranova, and Mark Andre, 8 PM, Konzerthaus Berlin, Gendarmenmarkt 2, 10117 Berlin

January 20: Fidan Aghayeva-Edler, piano, plays Linda Catlin Smith and Ann Southam, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

January 20: The Degs (Chris Dahlgren, bass, Daniel Erdmann, tenor and soprano saxophone, Gerhard Gschlößl, trombone, and Daniel Schröteler, drums), 9 PM, Kunstfabrik Schlot, Invalidenstraße 117, 10115 Berlin

January 21: Saviet/Houston Duo (Sarah Saviet, violin, and Joseph Houston, piano) play Heather Frasch; Jon Heilbron, double bass, Joseph Houston,piano, Heather Frasch, objects & electronics, and Eric Wong, electronics, play Michael Pisaro-Liu, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

January 21: Gebhard Ullman’s Basement Berlin (Silke Eberhard, alto saxophone, bass clarinet, Gebhard Ullmann, tenor saxophone, Jerome Bugnon, trombone, Oliver Potratz, double bass, and Mia Ohlmeier, drums), 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin

January 22: Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, clarinet, and Christian Lillinger, drums, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

January 23: Genevieve: A Performative Concert (Genevieve Murphy, vocals, keyboards, John Dikeman, saxophone, Marta Warelis, keyboards, and Henning Luther, drums), 8 PM, Neuköllner Oper, Karl-Marx-Straße 13112043 Berlin

January 23: Christof Thewes, trombone, and Jan Roder, double bass, 8:30 PM, Kühlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin

January 24: MAM.manufaktur für aktuelle musik plays Catherine Lamb, Raphaël Languillat, and Zeynep Toraman, with an installation by Ban Lei, 4 PM, teilelager, FAHRBEREITSCHAFT, Herzbergstraße 40-43 Haus 4, 10365 Berlin

January 24: Sarah Davachi, organ, plays Double Reeds, with a film by Dicky Bahto; Ellen Arkbro with the London Crumhorn Consort, 7PM, CTM Festival, Radialsystem V, Holzmarktstrasse 33, 10243 Berlin

January 24: Genevieve: A Performative Concert (Genevieve Murphy, vocals, keyboards, John Dikeman, saxophone, Marta Warelis, keyboards, and Henning Luther, drums), 8 PM, Neuköllner Oper, Karl-Marx-Straße 13112043 Berlin

January 24: Aki Takase, piano, Mike Majkowski, double bass, and Dag Magnus Narvesen, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

January 24: Cryptids (Caleb Wheeler Curtis, reeds, trumpet, Julius Gawlik, reeds, Marius Wankel, drums, and Felix Henkelhausen, double bass), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

January 25: Genevieve: A Performative Concert (Genevieve Murphy, vocals, keyboards, John Dikeman, saxophone, Marta Warelis, keyboards, and Henning Luther, drums), 8 PM, Neuköllner Oper, Karl-Marx-Straße 13112043 Berlin

January 25: Aki Takase, piano, plays duets with Alexander von Schlippenbach, piano, and Rudi Mahall, bass clarinet, 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin

Janauary 26: Lukas de Clerck, aulos; Dror Feiler’s NO Orchestra (Ghayath Almadhoun, voice, Boris Baltschun, Serge modular synthesizer, Laure Boer, monochord, electronics, Greta Christensen and Camilla Sörensen, turntables, Dror Feiler, reeds, electronics, Mazen Kerbaj, trumpet, electronics, Mats Lindström, electronics, Magda Mayas, clavinet, and Gustavo Obligado, saxophone, electronics), 7PM, CTM Festival, Radialsystem V, Holzmarktstrasse 33, 10243 Berlin