"Elan Pauer, real name Oliver Schwerdt (born 13 November 1979 in Eisenach) is a German musicologist and musician ( piano, percussion) in the field of new improvisational music.

Schwerd visited the school in Eisenach until he graduated from high school and received classical piano lessons at the local music school there. He performed his military service as a piano accompanist in the Bundeswehr's training music corps. His studies of music and cultural studies as well as the history of art at the University of Leipzig, which he received in 1999, culminated in a master's thesis on Georg Simmel and Dadaism, submitted to Klaus Christian Köhnke. In 2012, he promoted Sebastian Klotz at the Institute for Musicology of the University of Leipzig, for which he was also active as an instructor. At the center of his dissertation are the musical strategies of central actors in the scene of free improvised music following the success of free jazz and their spatial theories. He taught at the Museum für Musikinstrumente of the University of Leipzig and at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.

Out of his work in musicology, Schwerdt identified the challenge faced by the current museum practice as opposed to the "new combination of the drumming combination" , as it became "in European improvisational music" of the 20th century. He is committed to safeguarding the "first-generation of European free jazz and contemporary improvised music", which is "an endangered, historically so delicate, aesthetically highly fascinating and epistemologically valuable complex of objects". [8th]

As author of a music-critical article Schwerdt wrote among other things for the Neue Musikzeitung, jazzthetik and the jazz newspaper. He also compiled accompanying texts from Günter Sommer / Wadada Leo Smith as well as Alexander von Schlippenbach / Evan Parker / Paul Lovens and Urs Leimgruber. In 2003, he founded Euphorium Productions.

Since 1999, Schwerdt has been the artistic director of the EUPHORIUM_freakestra, a project group between contemporary improvisation, jazz, new music and theater, with Günter Sommer, Friedrich Schenker, Rudi Mahall, Paul Rutherford, Ernst Ludwig Petrovsky, Frank Möbus, Wadada Leo Smith, Axel Dörner, Barre Phillips, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker, Paul Lovens, Sven-Åke Johansson, Ulrich Gumpert, Manfred Hering, Dietmar Diesner, Roger Turner and others. At the 33rd Leipziger Jazztagen 2009 he performed with the Transatlantic Freedom Suite Tentets project at the Opernhaus Leipzig. From the project set, the quartet ember developed with Urs Leimgruber, Alexander Schubert and Christian Lillinger. He also works with Lillinger and Petrowsky in the New Old Lute Trio. With Schubert and Friedrich Kettlitz, Schwerdt operates the electrified noise ensemble trnn.

For his performance as a pianist and ensemble conductor in 2006, Schwerdt received the Leipziger Jazz-Nachwuchsstipendium from the Marion Ermer Foundation. Critics Ken Waxman (Jazzword) and Rigobert Dittmann (Bad Alchemy) listen to remixes by Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Cecil Taylor and Alexander von Schlippenbach in Schwerdt's pianist."