
[sharify]
Stefan Fraunberger
Stefan Fraunberger is an Austrian composer and artist exploring themes of transformation and liminality in sound, focusing on their interior counterpoint in relation to perception. Stefan engages in electro-acoustic dialogue with different instruments, beings and agencies beyond nature and culture. By investigating embodied understandings of the uncanny, his work touches on time, matter, memory and transition.
Approaching music as a sonic language of things, one connecting physical entities and interior states of being, lies at the core of his research into peripheries and imaginations relating human/non-human, material/spiritual domains.
Fraunberger holds a degree in electro-acoustic music and a diploma in Arabic language, oriental studies, and Euro-philosophy from the university of Vienna. One of is his main live-instruments, the hammered dulcimer, is used frequently in his Alpine homelands as well as in Eastern Europe and Central Asia – which reflects his shifting centre of gravity, interpolating between traditions and modernities ultimately bearing witness to our surroundings becoming alien through the very process of their unearthing.
Based in Vienna, he has lived and worked in Aleppo, Sana’a, Tehran, Sibiu, Benares, Brussels and unmentioned places for social work, residencies, research and studies. Stefan has studied several tongues and dialects. Since 2008 he has undergone sonic research in deserted fortified churches in Central-Transylvania – his long term project – “Quellgeister” – dealing with the influence of the non-human on terrestrial organ-machines. The third LP of recordings from the Quellgeister project was released 2019 on Morphine Records.
Fraunberger is frequently performing live with hammered dulcimers, creating installations and compositional-concepts for different materials, instruments, and media and has crafted sound for a variety of movies, radioplays and performances.
He was part of the “SHAPE” platform in 2017, and has had pieces commissioned for festivals including Donaufestival, Krems / CTM Festival, Berlin / Musikprotokoll, Graz / Outernational Days, Bucharest / Irtijal Festival, Beirut / UH-Fest, Budapest / Radical Tehran, Teheran / Les Brigittines, Bruxelles / Imago Dei,…
short: Stefan Fraunberger is a composer-performer-artist transforming things since 1980. His music engages in electro/acoustic dialogue with uncanny states and instruments such as dulcimers or decaying baroque church organs, reshaping the liminal conditions of culture and perception while inhabiting “sonic ambiguities and touching the void.” (The Wire)
„between melodies and noise washes, that never stop being engaging and provocative” (Quietus)
„aural narratives don’t come more stunning / there’s an uncanny beauty both to Fraunberger’s seemingly absurd actions & to the, frankly, amazing results” (4against5)
„megalithic sonic sculptures… fraunberger’s approach to transition is ceaslessly inventive“ (Auralaggravation)
„highly dissonant madness bordering the realms of lurking entities populating an intersecting parallel universe“ (Nitestylez)
„eschewing the pomp of sacred music for the fragile drone of an organic death knell“ (The Wire)
https://stefan.fraunberger.at/