Felix Kubin (born Felix Knoth; 1969 in Hamburg), is an electronic musician, composer, curator, sound and radio artist. He runs the record label Gagarin Records.
Kubin began his musical career at the age of eight with piano and electronic organ. From 1992 to 1996 he attended the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften), where he studied drawing, sound installation, video and animation film. In 1995, he received a DAAD grant and spent a year at the Media Art Department of the ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Enschede, Netherlands.
At the age of twelve, in 1981, he started recording his first pieces with synthesizer, organ, voice and drum machine. Two years later he began experimenting with a 4-track tape recorder. In 1983, he started the band "Die Egozentrischen 2" together with Stefan Mohr.
He was then soon discovered by the Hamburg label owner and impresario Alfred Hilsberg (ZickZack Records), who invited him to perform at various events, such as "In der Hitze der Nacht", a festival which took place in 1984 at Markthalle Hamburg. Some home recordings from this period have been included, among others, on the compilation "The Tetchy Teenage Tapes of Felix Kubin 1981–1985".[1]
During the 1990s, Kubin began to experiment with music made from noises and released several albums with his band "Klangkrieg". From 1992 to 1994 he was a member of the dada-communist singing group "Liedertafel Margot Honecker". In 1998, the same year in which he founded his own record label Gagarin Records, he turned to avant-garde pop. In the following years he expanded his artistic spectrum through lecture performances, the development of new radio formats and contemporary compositions for chamber orchestra and electronics.
Since 2005, Kubin has been increasingly involved with contemporary experimental music, working together with ensembles, and being invited to compose for various music halls. In 2010, in collaboration with the "ensemble Intégrales", he directed "Echohaus", a live concert for six rooms, headphone ensemble and electronics, which was premiered at the MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin. In 2013 and 2015 he was commissioned the two compositions "Chromdioxidgedächtnis" and "Takt der Arbeit" by "NDR das neue werk", a renowned radio series of contemporary music. 2016 saw the premiere of Kubin's opus magnus "Falling Still" at the Internationales Musikfest Hamburg. The orchestration of this 70min work includes string ensemble, percussion, a boys choir and live electronics. During the same year he composed music for an orchestra consisting of 20 Korg MS-20 synthesizers. The composition, by the title "A Choir of Wires", was performed by students of the LUCA School of Arts at Vooruit in Gent. In 2019 he founded the sequencer music duo CEL together with the Polish drummer Hubert Zemler. At the same time he began a collaboration with the Hamburg based Ensemble Resonanz that led to the composition of the pieces "Lunar Plexus" and "Telephobie".
French film director Marie Losier portrayed Felix Kubin in the award-winning film "Felix in Wonderland", which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2019.
Genre
Felix Kubin ́s music is influenced by the early Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), as well as contemporary classical and film music of the 20th century. A significant connection to Neue Deutsche Welle (in which he couldn't actively participate as he was too young)[2] can also be noticed in his surrealist German lyrics, which are wild, poetic and open to interpretation.[1]
Radio
Since 2001 Felix Kubin has been involved with radio, producing many plays and features (Hörspiel), which can be divided into three categories:
Radio plays which combine documentary footage with studio recordings in a fictional context, and therefore go beyond the classic feature style (Paralektronoia, Wiederhole 1–8, Syndikat für Gegenlärm, Mother in the fridge)
Dramatic Radio Plays (Orpheus' Psykotron, Orphée Mécanique, Die Machine steht still)
Sound Art (Nachtspeicher, Territerrortorium, Säugling, Duschkopf, Damenschritte)
Felix Kubin's radio play Orphée Mécanique has been awarded "Hörspiel des Jahres" in 2012 and "Best Audiobook" 2013/14 (Deutscher Hörbuchpreis).[3]
From 2010 to 2011, commissioned by Radio Web MACBA, he produced two podcast series: Parasol Elektroniczny – Rumours from the Eastern Underground, and Deutsche Kassettentäter – the rise of the German home-recording tape scene. The latter was also reflected in a compilation that he curated for the UK label Finders Keepers Records in 2014. Between 2015 and 2017, Kubin has been host and co-creator of the NDR radio show Toxic Tunes, a live recorded programme of experimental music and artist talks presented at Resonanzraum Hamburg. In 2017, he conceived the show "Me & My Rhythm Box" for Savvy Funk as part of the dOCUMENTA 14 exhibition. In 20 episodes, the show featured artists such as Sven-Åke Johansson, Andrea Neumann and Alessandro Bosetti who presented their self-built instruments live on air. Together with Felix Raeithel, he runs the conceptual DJ project Demo Dandies, a format that exclusively features demo tapes of the audience and listeners.
Film and theatre music
Kubin worked for theatre in collaboration with other artists such as Christoph Schlingensief („Atta Atta", Volksbühne Berlin, 2003), Mariola Brillowska („House of National Dog“, Kampnagel Hamburg, 2007), Schorsch Kamerun („Hollywood Elegien“, Ruhrtriennale Essen, 2002, „Des Kaisers Neue Kleider“, Schauspiel Köln, 2010) and Robert Florczak („Macbeth“, Shakespeare Festival, Danzig 2010). He composed music for animated films by Mariola Brillowska, Martha Colburn and Anke Feuchtenberger, as well as for the experimental short film “Terminal" by Jörg Wagner. He also wrote "propaganda film" screenplays for the dada-communist art party KED (Kommunistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) and produced short films that ran at international festivals and on television.[4] In 2023 he composed two soundtracks for the ARTE series "Female Comedies".[5]
Awards
Honorary Mention for the CD „Matki Wandalki“ at the Prix Ars Electronica, Digital Musics category, 2004
Parasol Elektroniczny. Rumours from the Eastern Underground Podcast series on the underground sound production in Eastern Europe, curated by Felix Kubin for Ràdio Web MACBA
Deutsche Kassettentäter. The rise of the German home-recording tape scene Podcast series on the Neue Deutsche Welle, curated by Felix Kubin for Ràdio Web MACBA
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References
1 2 The early synthie-pop experiments and sound designs on the Korg MS20 remind the musician Momus of the Düsseldorf group "Der Plan": Kubin gives the impression of "a former 13 and a half-year old genius, or a trickster whose greatest feat is that his fakes are completely genuine and his anachronisms completely contemporary…",“The Spinner", The Wire Magazin # 316, Juni 2010.
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