related realeases:Stephane Leonard
The artist and musician Stephane Leonard is actively involved in the contemporary and experimental musicscene in Berlin performing with improv groups (JuliJuni, Leo Mars, plastic doll...) and collaborating with various bands and soloperformers (dis.playce, Marcel Türkowsky, Claudio Pfeifer...). Moreover he is a founding member of the naivsuper artist collective that publishes and promotes modern composers and innovative soundartists. Either solo or in bands / projects he played concerts all over europe and regularly publishes music since 2002.
Stephane Leonard uses analoge, children and exotic instruments, vintage keyboards, effects, field recordings and synthesizer to create his very own soundsculptures / klangcollages. Tones, loops and atmospheres are transferred into the computer to be remodeled, cut apart, separated, reversed and rearranged. Permanent process, progressive, unique, unpretentious. silent, repetitive and deep.
Most of the later compositions are written with the help of a selfmade musicsoftware called FREITAG based on the programm Max/MSP.
The music is a combination of emotions and technique. Man versus machine, static and sterile computer generated sounds meet field recordings, played instruments, improvisations, loops, ambient atmospheres, glitches and glides. The results are very organic and sensitive - strict in structure and composition yet playful within every section. It is experimental, chaotic, harmonic, melancholic and rioteous in a hidden sense. It is a process between attracting and revolting opposites, somewhere between genres like Neue Musik, repetition-music, electronica, electro, experimental folk, jazz, improv, punk and ambient.
Live concerts are based on a concept of free improvisation using pre-recorded samples, short excerpts and sounds of the original piece as well as personal mood, room atmosphere and spontaneous ideas.
Studio-recordings are usually very slow demanding lots of time to reach the desired tension. The process is rather conceptual and strict. Most of the pieces are based on an idea, a story, a feeling, a picture, a film or a piece of memory.
Stephane Leonard was born in Berlin / Germany. From 2001-2002 he studied philosophy and art-history at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. From 2002-2008 he studied Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Bremen under Paco Knöller a former student of german artist Joseph Beuys. The main focus of his studies has always been in between drawing, music composition, film and video in order to experience the Arts from various different persepectives. In his work Stephane Leonard develops a unique way to express and explore the invisible, the unknown, the unseen and the unheard by combining the different genres. Besides his large scale drawings and paintings, illustrations for cd cover, numerous short, experimental films / videos as well as musicvideos for Berlin Post- and Emorock bands Stephane Leonard himself writes and records music since 1995.
His work has been shown in exhibitions in Berlin, Potsdam, Hamburg, Bremen, Neubrandenburg, Vienna, Zürich, Massachusetts and Bangkok.
www.stephaneleonard.net * www.naivsuper.de * www.naivsuperfilm.de * www.naivsuperbook.de