By Gregor Dotzauer
“Simply Existing Surface”, the most ambitious project of this year’s festival, is a commissioned work for his band Zooid and Silke Eberhard’s Potsa Lotsa XL. It takes us deep into the idiosyncratic sound cosmos of the 79-year-old multi-instrumentalist.
Zooids are barely represented in the great musical carnival of animals. They are completely mute and sedentary, so neither their call nor their way of moving can be imitated. The creatures, which mostly live in marine colonies, are also not immediately popular.
Whether they are fused together like the chalice worms or the catenulid flatworms, live together in a living tube like the pterygills and bryozoans, or even settle in an extracellular matrix, the tunica, like the tunicate: the superorganism they form is a miracle that can only be understood intellectually, and it took the alto saxophonist and flautist Henry Threadgill and his quintet Zooid to give them a place in music, at least metaphorically.
