fish is watching

fish is watching is a modular performance collective based in Stuttgart. Three participants working with modular synthesizers, hardware instruments, software tools, and self-built devices meet in a shared basement studio two to three times a week.

Practice

The work takes different forms. Weekly studio sessions are published as recorded, single take, no edits. Composed and edited tracks emerge from the same sessions over weeks and months. Site-specific performances take the practice into other spaces.

Each session is shaped by what the participants bring into the room. Accumulated listening, a prepared patch, a response to what happened last time. Nothing is scripted, but nothing is random either. The material carries forward.

Modular structure

Each participant is a module: a distinct setup, a method, a way of listening. The modules connect differently each time. The sound changes with the configuration.

Sometimes a session locks into a dense groove. Sometimes it drifts. Sometimes it falls apart. All of this is material. The weekly sessions document the process as it happened. The edited work reshapes it. Both are part of the same practice.

The collective does not choose between improvisation and composition. It treats them as different stages of the same material finding its form.

Participants

Alen Modular synthesizer. Evolving textures and psychedelic, slow-building sound fields. A core participant of the studio for over ten years.

Chris Hardware synthesizers, drum machines, samplers. Twenty years of experience in sound, from stage and technical production to his own music projects. The longtime anchor of this studio.

Dmitrii Software-based instruments, samplers, and self-built tools, from electromagnetic antennas to contact microphones and photoresistors.

The collective is open to other configurations. Other musicians have joined sessions with their own setups. The door is not closed.

The studio

A basement in central Stuttgart. The group has been working there for about ten years. The space is not designed for performance. It is a working room. The acoustics are what they are. That is part of the sound.