Herman Müntzing
Flexichord, electronics, objects
Musician, composer, educator
Attended the Royal Academy of Music in the late eighties and has since graduation transformed from a straight jazz/rock bass player into a more broadminded sound artist, working mainly in the fields of improvised and experimental music. Since the late nineties, his life as a musician includes different Swedish and international groups.
Giving concerts in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, UK, Iceland, Poland, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary, Belarus. Collaborations with Lisbeth Diers, Eugene Chabourne, Martin Küchen, Lotte Anker, Sten Sandell, Raymond Strid, among others...
He is giving lectures/workshops in many different situations, often striving for a new approach to the boundaries between sound, noise and music. "Creative sound research", "Graphic Notation" and "building experimental musical objects" is example of workshops he has led several times. The interest in expanding the common thoughts about the qualifications for a "real" musical instrument made him search for new sounds in the everyday surroundings, exploring casual objects and their own unique sound qualities.
Eventually this research made him create, in cooperation with guitarbuilder Martin Kuhn, the "Flexichord", a 12-stringed experimental music instrument made out of string and pickups from two electric guitars attached to ahorizontal solid piece of wood. Performing the flexichord invites him to prapare and play the instrument with different materials and objects like rubber, stones, glass, metal, sawblades, sticks etc. Combining this with electronics and sampling shows the essence in his aestetics.
Working Bands
Müntzing/Diers Duo
(with Lisbt Diers)
Küchen & Müntzing Scheibenhonig
(with Martin Küchen)
Elektrobotanisk musik
(with Sten Sandell)
Sound of Mucus
(with Martin Küchen and Andreas Axelsson)
ChadKlappMuntz
(with Eugene Chadbourne and Martin Klapper)
Rhododendron String Band
with Stephan Sieben, Samuel Hällquist and Johannes Burström)
Some selected events
2013: Festival Nutidsklang, Copenhagen / Sound installation and exhibition of graphic scores, Berlin /
Copenhagen Jazz Festival / Concerts and masterclas with Ensemble Morph, Sweden.
2012: with Lisbeth Diers at GAS festivalen and Kalvfesivalen. Concerts and masterclass with Ensemble Morph in Sweden and in Belarus.
2011: Performing the piece "MORF 1" in Spain and Sweden. Tour with Scheibenhonig in Poland, Germany and Slovenia. recording second solo album "Självskalv"
2010: Solo concerts in Sweden and Poland
2009: Tours in Europe, playing solo and in Ad Hoc-meetings/ Cocart Festival, Torun /
Copenhagen Jazz Festival / Concerts and masterclas with Ensemble Morph, Sweden.
2012: with Lisbeth Diers at GAS festivalen and Kalvfesivalen. Concerts and masterclass with Ensemble Morph in Sweden and in Belarus.
2011: Performing the piece "MORF 1" in Spain and Sweden. Tour with Scheibenhonig in Poland, Germany and Slovenia. recording second solo album "Självskalv"
2010: Solo concerts in Sweden and Poland
2009: Tours in Europe, playing solo and in Ad Hoc-meetings/ Cocart Festival, Torun /
Audio Art Festival, Krakow / Festival Sounds, Stockholm
2008: STUND – a 12 hour non-stop concert with 30 musicians, Simrishamn / Festival UNSOUND, Minsk / Tours Sweden and Denmark
2007: Tour in Europe , playing solo and in Ad Hoc-meetings
2006: Tours Sweden and Denmark
2005: Festival Borderline, Malmö
2004: Tours UK
2003: Festival Explorateurs Associes, Lorgues / Festival Retine, Albi / Malmöfestivalen, Malmö
Festival de Densités, Fresnes-en-voevre / International Art Film festival, Simrishamn
2002: Sound of Mucus tours Sweden
Discography
Herman Müntzing "Självskalv" Treffpunkt/2012
Rhododendron String Band “Keep on the sunny side” BoogiePost Recordings/2009
Herman Müntzing cdr “Stockholm
Herman Müntzing “Deconstruct” Creative Sources Recordings / 2006
Frontroom Ensemble “Fylkingen Lightbox” Flying Aspidistra / 2006
Sound of Mucus “Lorgues 21´13” Bab-ili-lef 06 / 2004
Sound of Mucus “Filth Pharmacy” Ninth World Music / 2004
ChadKlappMuntz “ Lorgues suite” Bab-ili-lef 01 / 2004
ChadKlappmuntz “ChadKlappMuntz” House of Chadula 2003
Random Buffs “take 6” Olof Bright EP 03 / 2000
Sounds 99 (compilation) BTCD 09,10,11 / 2000
Review on Herman Müntzing CD “Deconcstruct”
“Nice exhibit of solo performance for this experimental musician playing a Flexichord a sampler and some objects. A Flexichord is a string instrument Muntzing has built with the help of Martin Kohn, it looks like a weird mixture of a zither and a guzheng, this swedish musician plugs, strikes, scratches the strings with a incredible number of objects remembering the approach of Fred Frith to go beyond traditional guitar playing. "DeConstruCt" is an interesting effort and take for granted it has its moments, for example the opening and the closing tracks simply blew me away” … “If you force me to do a mannerist classification I'd put together definitions like abstract soundscapes counterpoised to melodic, minimalist tracks" where the voice of the harmony of the instruments becomes central. An interesting work, above all when he goes really close to some traditional way of playing harps.
Andrea Ferraris, Chain DLK, April 2008
“The genius of the 42-minute-long DeConstruCt lies not in the fact that no two tracks are even nearly identical, but that not even two similar compositions can be found on it. The opening and closing “First Construction” and “second Construction” are improvisations on pure zither sounds, their looped layers continuously being concentrated, their quick repetitions added on to each other. Following the shortish sound sketch in the “Out of Sand” track, the flexichord sounds more like a loosely strung base guitar; the three-part “New Times, New Tools” offers ever-never sounds which eventually find their places in the structure. “Other Materials” builds on scratching noises, blazingly spiralling out of the instrument, coupled with “discovered sounds”. All ten parts are thus unique. The entire album is suitably varied. These rare recordings are of such magnitude that they, contrary to the pledge in their title, convinced me that Herman Müntzing cannot only destroy; ha can also build, and not just in any old way”
Dusted Hoffman, Improv.hu, May 2007
“The flexichord, Herman Müntzing's instrument of choice, as portrayed in the CD leaflet, is a horizontal stringed hybrid (somehow reminiscent of the self-mades that characterized Elliott Sharp's early records) played with various objects and utensils. In "First Construction" and "Second Construction", slow glissandos spotted by scintillating plucked droplets, we enjoy its more pleasing aspects; "Out Of Sand" features Frith-like volume swells and morphing figures, the contact with the strings harsher or less depending on the object used. Occasionally, a sampler freezes and alters a few frames, reshaping the architecture of the improvisations. "Door" sounds like a ping-pong game played on a table full of metal wires, while in "New Times, New Tools" the pickups concentrate the music's energy in selected focal points, the whole becoming more percussive and unstable. "Other Materials" throws out boings and ga-zoings enhanced by short jazzy samples. Not a bad album, in spurts.”
Massimi Ricci, Paris Atlantic , May 2007
Review on solo concert at CoCart Festival, Torun , Poland
“The first concert I took part in was a very small performance which was not held in the CSW but in the nearby Ethnographic Museum Stockholm
Agnes, Alternation, August 2009
Review on Sound of Mucus CD “ Filth Pharmacy”
“the band´s sound owes much of its distinctiveness to the string textures created by Herman Müntzing
– who has played with American guitarist Eugene Chadbourne – from his self-invented flexichord and his sampler” Ken Waxman,
One Final Note, June 2005
“ this is improvisation on the brink of a cliff. You were afraid to jump but once you do, it’s a feeling of utter freedom and ecstasy.”
Tom Sekowski, GA-ZETA, March 2005
”Sound of Mucus is trying to liberate these sounds so this homemade comic improv has a serious purpose. Their genius is that these worldly effects don’t come across as documentary”
Andy Hamilton, The Wire, April 2005