THE HONEY PUMP

Mia Zabelka (AT) – Violin
Nicola L. Hein (GER) – Guitar

THE HONEY PUMP brings together two very active musicians on the european scene of improvised music: Mia Zabelka from Vienna and Nicola L. Hein from Cologne.

Their music is created in the moment, without previously agreed upon concepts or compositions and develops its inner dynamics from discourse of the individual yet related voices.

Besides the pleasure in free improvisation itself, a further strong basis that the musicians share is the process of extending traditional instrumental techniques (both with and without preparation and tools), with which the group creates dense but dynamic sonic landscapes with significant room for silence.

A prominent influence and origin to the practise of extending the sonic vocabulary of an instrument through extended techniques in improvised music (e.g. using either mechanic preperations or differentmanual ways of turning an instrument into a soundmachine) was Fluxus. In trying to tackle ideas of music that were perceived as bering traditional, this group of artists developed an enormous creativity in the use of musical instruments. Therefore, a lot of improvising musicians of the first hour were in close contact with the visual art or were visual artists themselves (Brötzmann, Bennik etc.).

One of the artists that were involved with Fluxus is Joseph Beuys, one of the major artists of the 20th century. His work at the Documenta 6, 1977 In Kassel, “Honigpumpen am Arbeitsplatz” was the inspiration for Mia Zabelka and Nicola L. Hein to call themselves “The Honey Pump”.

Following Joseph Beuys’ idea of the social plastic The Honey Pump understand their musical practise as a forum for an open aesthetic discussion that ultimately aims at stimulating the creative and plastic forces in society.