"Antti Virtaranta is a Finnish bassist and composer. He began his music journey at 17 years old focusing on Jazz music, attending University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Quickly he was introduced to free jazz and experimental electronic music, and this changed everything. He moved to Berlin to join the vibrant scene of improvisers, starting projects with many musicians and developing his own sound. Currently he is focused on expressing his voice in music and sound through composition and improvisation. Using his influences from jazz and rock music and self-taught contemporary music, his musical language is formed. Nowadays, his focus is on concepts and compositions for solo bass and solo electronics, and using non-conventional notations. These ideas develop and are imposed into the small groups (duos and trios) and larger ensembles that he is involved with to create instant composition in his varying projects, which include collaborations with dancers and visual artists, on top of the numerous musicians he works with."

"Joshua Weitzel is a musician, curator and researcher born in 1989.

As an improviser, composer and performer he is mostly active in the field of experimental music, jazz and the grey areas in-between. His instruments of choice are guitar (acoustic and electric) and shamisen, which he plays both employing traditional and extended/invented playing techniques such as using circular breathing on stringed instruments, preparations and scordatura. His music is primarily concerned with spaces, contrast, harmony, timbre and interaction between players.

Aside from his own music practice he curates concerts, performances and exhibitions in Kassel. He was the artistic director interim of the art space Galerie Feiertag from 2019-2020 and the artistic director of the concert series Chamäleon Experimente (2018), Chamäleon Clash (2019) and Chamäleon Verbindungen (2020/21). In 2020, the concert series is awarded the culture prize of Kassel (Kulturförderpreis Stadt Kassel).

He further coordinates online-releases and concerts under the umbrella Kassel Experimental Music Productions. He also works as a gallery educator and art mediator (among others dOCUMENTA (13), 11. Berlin Biennale new talents biennale Cologne, and KW Institute Berlin).

His research interests are located at the intersection of musicology, art history, and education.

He holds a Master's degree with distinction from King's College London and a Bachelor's degree from Göttingen University. Currently, he is working on a PhD in music at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, where he writes about sound in the context of the history of documenta exhibitions. Since May 2020 he is artistic-scientific asscociate for sound art and sound research at the Hochschule für Musik Mainz in the group Art - Sound - Research led by Prof. Peter Kiefer. "

Rieko Okuda is a pianist and a composer from Japan. She began to play Classical music at the age of 3. She also studied Music Therapy at Doshisha Women College. Music Therapy led her into Contemporary music and Improvised music. After she graduated from the college, she moved to USA to study Jazz music. She fell right into the Jazz scene in USA, performing with some of the great American Jazz musicians (Bob Mintzer, Jon Faddis, John Fedchock etc) at several jazz festivals such as North Texas Jazz Festival, Nortredam Jazz Festival to name a few. A couple of years later, she got interested in Free Jazz and Improvised music while she was in Phliladelphia. She performed with the great improvisers includes Marshall Allen (from San Ra Orchestra), Elliott Levine (recorded with Cecil Taylor), and Calvin Weston (recorded with Ornette Coleman). Her interests in Improvised music led her to move to Berlin. She performs with various musicians in Berlin ex. Tobias Delius, Axel Dörner, Els Vendaweyer, Linda Frederickson, ect. Also, she collaborates with contemporary dancers such as Yuko Kaseki, Akemi Nagao, and Annapaola Leso (from Sasha Waltz.) She performs at several experimental festivals: A'Larme Festival, JOE Festival Essen, Brda Contemporary Music Festival, XChange Festival, Experymental Festival, Flux Festival, and Soundance Festival to name a few.

In 2017 and 2018, she got the residency in Elektronik Music Studio (EMS) in Stockholm, Sweden. This residency experiences inspired her to Electro-Acoustic field, and she started to invite the electronics to her piano solo pieces. Her first Electro-Acoustic solo album "Paranorm" was released from Japanese record lable, Athor Harmonics, on Feburary 2018. "Paranorm" was performed at Koncertkirken Blagards Plads (DK), Ausland, FLUX Festival (DE), and Vardklockans Församling (SE).

In 2020, she has gotten the residency in Visby International Centere for Composers (VICC) to extend her experience, and find more possibilities to create various sounds and composition techniques.

"Dirk Marwedel Born 1959. Since 1985 Dirk Marwedel has been working in the area of ​​improvised music and related musical concepts as well as in interdisciplinary projects with performance, sound installation, film, dance, theater, sculpture and painting. In continuous interplay with different groups as well as soloist he has developed sounding techniques and preparations with which he easily exceeds the limits of familiar concepts of the sound spectrum of the saxophone and irritates listening habits. The permanent process of material and sound enhancement can also lead to play on hoses, balloons, with water or other sound bodies, even beyond the original instrument. With his work on slate slabs ("TonSchiefer") and the sculptures by the sculptor couple Livia Kubach and Michael Kropp, Dirk Marwedel, who also trained as a sculptor, explores and develops the sound qualities of stone.

Solistically, Dirk Marwedel draws particular attention to dynamic and structural movement. Dense monolithic sound currents can contrast with fine tissues, which are reduced to only a few senses, sequences of classical toning complement each other with grotesque or fragile, silent, brittle or bursting overflowing forms beyond the chromatically tempered tonal space. The limits and meanings of sound, sound and sound are moving, touching, mixing and differentiating. Silence is perceived as a fundamental element of musical experience.

Central themes in the area of ​​performance (for example in the case of sound video performance> no change changing <) are the inevitability and irreversibility of movement and development. With concentrated acoustic and visual material, processes that are fragmented in the phenomena of repetition and change, memory and present are perceived in the light of their incessant passing over one another. Even more direct than in purely concertante performances is the irritation and questioning of fixed, automated boundaries and interpretations and the opening of unexpected perceptions. Recent works such as the "fields of intercourse", the "court paintings" and the project "Living Sculpture" also deal with the center of perception, the perceiving and perceptive human beings themselves, with their modes, the Familiar, the stranger, to meet oneself.

Dirk Marwedel has appeared in Europe and Canada. He lives in Wiesbaden and is co-founder and organizer of the HumaNoise congress - day improvised music."

"Matthias Schubert (born April 18, 1960 in Kassel ) is a German jazz musician (tenor saxophone, oboe and composition).

Schubert had oboe lessons as a teenager. The saxophonists Allan Praskin and Melvin Phillips introduced him to jazz. He studied from 1979 to 1983 at the University of Music and Performing Arts Hamburg with Andy Scherrer, Herb Geller and Walter Norris. He played for a long time in the Euro Jazz Band, the Graham Collier Band and the Marty Cook Group, but also with the groups of Albert Mangelsdorff, Manfred Bründl and others.

He played in the quartet with Simon Nabatov, Lindsey Horner and Tom Rainey during the 1990s. He forms a trio with Carl Ludwig Hübsch and Wolter Wierbos. He has founded the James Choice Orchestra with Hübsch, Frank Gratkowski and Norbert Stein. He also played with Karl Berger, Klaus King, Kathrin Lemke, Jeanne Lee, Joachim Ullrich, Andreas Willers, Xu Fengxia, Scott Fields, Uwe Oberg,Uli Böttcher and Alois Kott. In 2001 he was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Music, Drama and Media Hanover."