Mitch & Mitch & Kassin, Howie Lee & Teom Chen

9pm Mitch & Mitch & Kassin | Concert, Foyer
10.30pm Howie Lee & Teom Chen | Live Set, Hirschfeld Bar

Mitch & Mitch & Kassin
Whether you are rather skeptical of the copyright system like Mitch & Mitch or are a big fan of intellectual property rights like Kassin, the six- to nine-member jazz-rock big band from Warsaw and the music producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist from Rio de Janeiro agree that musicians’ biggest concerns are less about copyright than about royalties. So how can you generate as much income as possible with a concert by exploiting rights? A shared love of bizarre songs, of art hidden behind kitsch, of elaborate arrangements and wondrous storytelling brought together the stars of the Polish jazz scene and the producer of Brazilian stars like Adriana Calcanhotto and Los Hermanos two years ago. Their artistic dialog created Visitantes Nordestinos, an uplifting album full of varied tempos, synthesizer swirls, elegant winds and playful connections between Bossa nova and beat. For their show at HKW, they’ve already announced with a wink that they will generate more royalties than Sting does in a minute.

Howie Lee & Teom Chen
“I just copy,” says Howie Lee. For him, creativity is merely passive behavior because he doesn’t believe in the ego. Yet the DJ, music producer and video artist pioneers the new sound of a growing electronic underground scene in Beijing centered on Lee’s own record label Do Hits. Lee lavishly layers drummed percussion and rolling beats, worker songs and radio pop snippets, dark basses, eerie trills and ghostly voices: acoustic references to Chinese origins and the homelessness of globalized consumer culture, to the legacy of ancient music traditions, the cyberpunk of the 1980s and the hyper-artificial visions of today’s post-digital, technology-obsessed fanaticism for progress. Howie Lee creates the sound of the Sino-futuristic present where Western clichés of China and post-humanistic superpower fantasies merge and Artificial Intelligence reduces any concept of originality to absurdity. Lee teamed up with simulation designer Teom Chen to create an immersive virtual reality game world in which humanity is entangled in the webs of information systems and in the consequences of audiovisual overdoses.