The thirtieth edition of the creative development program with mentor Jan Brauer and mentees Mona Yim and Anchoress. The residency is still running despite the current lockdown. The showcase is postponed until further notice. Follow Amplify social channels to see what will come out of this new month of creative guidance.
ABOUT
Jan Brauer was born in 1985 in Wiesbaden, Germany. After finishing school in 2004, he went for an apprenticeship as media designer, followed by studies of time based media in Mainz and Sound Studies at University of the Arts Berlin. Since 2009 he is founding member of the German music group Brandt Brauer Frick, with international live shows in classical concert venues, as well as electronic music festivals, and everything in between.
With his group, Brauer released five long players and many singles and remixes. In regular project-based collaborations, for example with Venezuelan El Sistema Orquesta in 2020, or director Martin Butler in 2016, when the group wrote an opera titled Gianni at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Brauer lives in Berlin, where he works as musician, sound designer and -recordist and lately started composing music for theaters such as Berliner Ensemble, Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) or Theater in der Josefstadt, Vienna.
Mona Yim
... is a music producer, singer-songwriter, DJ and violinist. Born and raised in the south of germany she has Singaporean-Chinese and German roots and is currently based in Berlin. While spending a lot of time in the clubs of London, Berlin and Paris she discovered her love for electronic dance music and started to DJ and play live-sets. Mona Yims musical style can be described as House and Techno with UK rave influences. Inspired by artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Haruki Murakami and David Lynch she explores topics such as female empowerment, the exploration of her own identity and mental health and creates stories with a slightly surrealistic touch.
Anchoress
... is a project by Berlin based composer, singer and artist Anna Lucia Nissen. Anchoress understands music as a way to explore spaces beyond logical boundaries, creating a world that allows for connections on both an intellectual and emotional level. With a focus on vocal delivery she crafts arcane eulogies centered around her distinctively androgynous tenor howl. Anchoress' songs are cinematic in the way they reveal their narratives, and she considers song writing to be like scoring an imagined film. Accompanied by haunting strings, android choirs and swelling synthesizer drones, her vocals metamorphose into different characters. These lyrical protagonists are amalgamations of historical figures, feminist literature and observations of her surroundings telling stories about female anger, 21st century alienation and their yearning for new forms of collectiveness. Influenced by the experimental use of orchestral music of artists such as Scott Walker or Franco Battiato, Anchoress fuses elements of modern classical, dark post-industrial sounds and Gregorian chant into devotional hymns which collapse in on themselves to form uncanny ecstatic dirges.