German, Köln-based self-taught pianist, synth player and guitarist, composer, and sound artist Stefan Strasser celebrated in November 2025 his 60th birthday, and invited two musicians, he never met in person before – German, Berlin-based recorder player and vocalist Teresa Hackel, with whom he met through the Virtual London Improvisation Workshop, and Austrian, Vienna–based violinist, vocalist, and electronics player Mia Zabelka, who collaborated with him before remotely on The Confidence Of One Swimming Against The Current, with Ukrainian musician Tungu, aka Sergey Senchuk (FMR, 2024).
Köln 60 documents the trio’s first-ever, free improvised live performance at the vibrant acoustics of BLOCK 7 in Köln, with all the birthday guests who supported this concert. Strasser mixed and mastered the recording. By the end of the night, a new trio was formed. It took the trio only a few minutes to establish its emphatic yet quite stormy collective electroacoustic dynamics.
The four pieces suggest intuitive, intimate, spontaneous dialogues, often quite intense and thorny. Hackel, Strasser, and Zabelka explore their naked and vulnerable feelings and patiently transform this emotional whirlwind into a subtle, elusive, and shape-shifting electroacoustic alchemical compound of breath, voice, touch, and caress, while corresponding with BLOCK7’s reverberating acoustics. The focus here is on the nuanced yet unpredictable creative process and not the end result, so the pieces’ titles refer to it, and to “Distributed Time”, “Residual Structure”, and end with “Unclosed”, dream-like, exotic conclusion. It turned out to be an impressive birthday present.
Here a video extract of the recording at BLOCK 7, November 28th, 2025
HCK / STR / ZBL – Köln 60 (Creative Sources, 2026)
