Chess Medi Workshop / Wolf Müller & Niklas Wandt

Two opportunities to experience kraut-influenced club music – and finally find inner peace in a stressful world.

Inspired by the minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Ash Ra Tempel musician Manuel Göttsching composed »E2-E4,« a one-hour piece for guitar and electronics. It is now considered a classic of electronic music (and also part of the playlist of Gisèle Vienne’s piece CROWD). Nowhere is the much-cited connection between techno, krautrock and minimal music more apparent than in this hypnotically pulsating masterpiece from 1981. In a commission by the Summer Festival, Chess Medi Workshop has now created an outernational interpretation of the classic. The group is made up of Circuit Diagram musicians Kris Jakob and Nicolas Sheikholeslami, the Somalian multi-instrumentalist Mohamed Maalow Nuur (whom Sheikholoslami knows from his work on a Grammy-nominated compilation of Somalian music that was lost as a result of wars), and Mehmet Naar, a Turkish player of the baglama, a string instrument characteristic of »E2-E4«. In the evening’s second act, Wolf Müller, aka Jan Schulte, a producer and DJ-wizzard from circles associated with Düsseldorf’s Salon des Amateurs, and Niklas Wandt present their widely praised new-age barefoot-dance club album: »Instrumentalmusik von der Mitte der World« (Instrumental Music from the Center of the World).