About Wouter
Wouter Jaspers is an electro-acoustic music worker, composer, and (electronic) instrument designer making use of his busy tour schedule to amass a fieldrecording and noise archive where the narrative qualities of sound become catalysts for dark musical chasms and ear-splitting adventures.
Jaspers records and performs music under his own name, but also as Franz Fjödor, Das Gezicht, A Cryptic Mantra and many others. He has performed as part of The Haters, To Live and Shave in LA, with Dutch legend Frans de Waard he is Ezdanitoff, and with fellow Berliner Hainbach he performs and releases records as Odd Narrative and together with Karin Weissenbrunner DECCAdent.
He is the co-founder of Berlin instrument manufacturer KOMA Elektronik and produces microphones and special instruments for his own brand Sonic Artefacts. Since 2022 he is an active collaborator at Sonoscopia in Porto, where he mostly works on the experimental sound studio. Besides his research and composition work he also works regularly as a sound director and performer with Ensemble KNM Berlin and does live sound direction and live electronics with Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske.
In the last quarter of 2024 and thru 2025 Jaspers will work on multiple collaborative projects, amongst which a residency at NYU Abu Dhabi together with Michael Ang, a performance with German contrabass clarinettist Theo Nabicht, a full length album together with Portuguese saxophonist Pedro Alves Sousa and a concert series and research project focussing on radiowaves together with Sonoscopia’s Henrique Fernandes.
Since 2005 Jaspers has appeared at numerous festivals around the world, including Gaudeamus Muziekweek Netherlands, CTM / Transmediale Festival Berlin; Festival of Modular at Contact Tokyo (Japan), Disko Bay Festival Oqaasut / Illulissat (Greenland), Relative (Cross) Hearings Festival in Budapest (Hungary), Sønderborg Electronic Music Festival (Denmark), ZXZW Festival later: Incubate Festival (Netherlands), Interpenetration Festival in Graz (Austria), November Music (Netherlands) and Avant Music Festival in Wroclaw (Poland). Appearances have taken him to places such as Roulette New York (USA), Les Dominicains Guebwiller (France) and Mutek Montreal (CA) as well as to RAI Radio 1 in Italy, Dutch national radio at Concertzender and Lithuanian national radio LRT Klasik for classical and new music.
Over the course of his career, Jaspers developed a fascination for modifying analog devices and was the co-founder and chief designer of the musical instrument manufacturer KOMA Elektronik in Berlin between 2011 and 2020. In this role, he designed electronic musical instruments for musicians keen to experiment, including the popular Field Kit series for electroacoustic sound experiments (exhibited in 2017 at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York City). In 2016 the company opened Common Ground in Berlin – a workshop and a shop for DIY instruments, workshops and meetings. After Jaspers left the company at the end of October 2020, he is concentrating his time on his artistic (musical) activities, gives workshops on electronic music and stimulate new ideas in dialogue with DIY culture and other musical instrument designers.
As a curator, Jaspers has directed several festivals, such as the Eurovision Noise Festival for the Incubate Festival (Netherlands) or the annual Forthwith Festival in Winnipeg (Canada, 2017-2019). In the covid-summer of 2021 he curated the When I Sleep, The Trees Get Bigger Festival in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. He gave artist workshops at STEIM, Institute for Electronic Music in Amsterdam, at Leiden University, the University of Tilburg, the multimedia center Worm in Rotterdam and at Native Instruments in Berlin. He has also been responsible for the labels Vatican Analog, Tilburg, Netherlands since 2006 and AMOK Tapes, Berlin, Germany from 2012 – 2020.
Wouter Jaspers was awarded the Arbeitsstipendium für Ernste Musik und Klangkunst 2021 by the Berlin Senat for his research project Artic Survey Music, which examines the ubiquitous transmission signals in the very low frequency range of the radio spectrum in order to address the contrast between urban environments and natural landscapes. This project culminated into his latest work for 32 radio frequencies “Antennenfeld”, which had its world premiere at (in)tangible transmissions at Floating University in Berlin at the end of July 2022.
In 2022 Wouter received funding through the German Musikfonds to work on his latest research project exploring Chess-based musical composition, formulating new compositional techniques based on John Cage’s Reunion concert, which he will debuted at Sonoscopia in Porto, Portugal in the end of 2023.
