CTM 2027: The Time Between Us

Developed by Stefan Schultze and the Distributed Ensemble, »The Time Between Us« extends Schultze’s long-running interest in improvisation and electronically mediated composition. His work with dense ensemble structures and Black MIDI feeds into a broader fascination with the strange threshold where individual lines begin to merge into collective sonic mass. Distributed Ensemble pushes that fascination into networked space, making themselves fluid, dispersed and constantly reassembled through technology. The project turns physical separation into a compositional condition, allowing sound to travel between locations and accumulate into a shared performance space to produce an unstable sense of where the ensemble actually exists. The ensemble of Almut Kühne, Elena Kakaliagou, Els Vandeweyer, Felix Henkelhausen, Leonhard Huhn, Magnus Schriefl, Moritz Baumgärtner, Peter Ehwald, Peter Meyer, Roland Neffe, and Stefan Schultze is spread out across the space in different stations, moving through shifting musical constellations. Their collective music-making is shaped by machine learning, musical agent systems, and adaptive spatial synthesis developed with Nicola Hein and Pierre-Alexandre Tremblay. Responding to one another and to their machine interlocutors, the musicians continually explore new sonic relationships and contexts that emerge.