Stephan Wittwer is moving into Perla-Mode on Langstrasse for a few days. The rehearsals and preparations are open to the public and are followed by two concerts in the evening.
In the late seventies, Stephan Wittwer shook up the music scene between experimental, jazz and metal as a representative of a new avant-garde and the second generation of European improvisers (according to Felix Klopothek, the Lost Generation,2011,). He played noisy music on an old Fender Telecaster and was probably the first guitarist to use ‘Electric Solid Body Guitar’ in this context. Stephan Wittwer has played numerous concerts in the international experimental and free jazz scene, with great musicians and composers such as Paul Lovens and Radu Malfatti.
After the solo piece ‘Music without Pictures’, with Marshall system, Quad system and laptop (Bologna, New York, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Swiss National Library), and a subsequent concert in April 2004 in Cologne with Michael Wertmüller and Marino Pliakas, guitarist Stephan Wittwer (‘…perhaps the last living metal guitarist …’, Felix Klopotek, SPEX. ‘A fundamentalist of electronically manipulated string material …’, Peter Rüedi) put his guitar away and has never played it since.
Stephan Wittwer has been interested in computer programming for almost seven years. Wittwer’s performances are a rarity. Commenting on his project ‘Several short concerts’ at message salon, the musician says: “In the last few weeks I’ve mainly been struggling with “graphical user interfaces”, not with audio directly at all. I think I’ve developed two or three useful alternatives or extensions to the ‘widgets’ offered by SuperCollider or Frameworks. This work takes a lot of time – I’m self-taught in programming – and that leads to the problem that when I finally link the graphic-tactile objects with acoustic, musical ones, i.e. create virtual instruments that should be suitable for playing, I can’t even play them yet. Or they don’t work. I will probably work with scripts, programme text.”