Alex Buess is a Swiss

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and def ...

saxophone The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to p ...

player, producer and

sound artist Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary time-based medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in hybrid forms. According to Brandon LaBelle, ...

born in 1954 in

Basel Basel ( ; ), also known as Basle ( ), ; ; ; . is a city in northwestern Switzerland on the river Rhine (at the transition from the High Rhine, High to the Upper Rhine). Basel is Switzerland's List of cities in Switzerland, third-most-populo ...

(CH).

Biography

He collaborates (has collaborated) with Stephan Wittwer,

Paul Schütze Paul Schütze (born 1 May 1958) is an Australian artist resident in London. Over thirty years his work has spanned composition, performance, installation, video, printmaking and photography. Biography Schütze was born in Melbourne, Australia ...

, Kevin Martin,

Peter Brötzmann Peter Brötzmann (6 March 1941 – 22 June 2023) was a German jazz saxophonist and clarinetist regarded as a central and pioneering figure in European free jazz. Throughout his career, he released over fifty albums as a bandleader. Amongst his m ...

, William Parker,

Raoul Björkenheim Raoul Melvin Björkenheim (born February 11, 1956) is a Finnish-American jazz guitarist, who has lived in Helsinki, New York, and Los Angeles. His mother is Finnish-American actress Taina Elg.''Finlands ridderskaps och adels kalender 1992'', pp ...

Toshinori Kondo was a Japanese avant-garde jazz and jazz fusion trumpeter. Career Kondo was born in Ehime Prefecture. He attended Kyoto university in 1967, and became close friends with percussionist Tsuchitori Toshiyuki. In 1972 the pair left university, and ...

Bill Laswell William Otis Laswell (born February 12, 1955) is an American bass guitarist, record producer, and record label owner. He has been involved in thousands of recordings with many collaborators from all over the world. His music draws from funk, wo ...

Kevin Shields Kevin Patrick Shields (born 21 May 1963) is an Irish musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer, who achieved international fame as the lead vocalist and guitarist of the alternative rock band My Bloody Valentine (band), My Bloody Valenti ...

( My Bloody Valentine),

Tim Hodgkinson Timothy George Hodgkinson (born 1 May 1949) is an English experimental music composer and performer, principally on reeds, lap steel guitar, and keyboards. He first became known as one of the core members of the British avant-rock group Henry ...

, Michael Wertmüller,

Daniel Buess Daniel Buess (28 January 1976 – 10 March 2016) was a Swiss drummer, percussion player and sound artist from Basel. Biography He studied percussion at the Musikhochschule Basel with Siegfried Schmid and with Isao Nakamura in Karlsruhe. His ...

and many other musicians in the wide field of

improvisation Improvisation, often shortened to improv, is the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found. The origin of the word itself is in the Latin "improvisus", which literally means un-foreseen. Improvis ...

electronics Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other Electric charge, electrically charged particles. It is a subfield ...

electroacoustic music Electroacoustic music is a Music genre, genre of Western art music in which composers use recording technology and audio signal processing to manipulate the timbres of Acoustics, acoustic sounds in the creation of pieces of music. It originated a ...

and

composition Composition or Compositions may refer to: Arts and literature *Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography * Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include ...

. He plays/played in the groups

ICE Ice is water that is frozen into a solid state, typically forming at or below temperatures of 0 ° C, 32 ° F, or 273.15 K. It occurs naturally on Earth, on other planets, in Oort cloud objects, and as interstellar ice. As a naturally oc ...

God In monotheistic belief systems, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. In polytheistic belief systems, a god is "a spirit or being believed to have created, or for controlling some part of the un ...

, Phantom City, The Bug, Sprawl, Cortex and his own group

16-17 16-17 is a band from Basel, Switzerland. Their music combines punk rock, hardcore punk, jazz and industrial music. Biography 16-17 was founded in 1983 by Alex Buess, Knut Remond and Markus Kneubühler. When the group played its first con ...

Buess has written compositions for various contemporary music ensembles such as e. g. the

Ensemble Modern Ensemble Modern is an international ensemble dedicated to performing and promoting the music of contemporary composers. Formed in 1980, the group is based in Frankfurt, Germany, and made up variously of about twenty members from numerous countri ...

, the Xasax Saxophone Quartett Paris or the Ensemble Phoenix Basel and also works as a producer and sound engineer. His compositions are performed in Europe and throughout the world. Several of his works have been commissioned by well known music festivals. Buess`s compositions are characterized by dense layers of sound, polyrhythmic and microrhythmic structures. He has a penchant for using acoustic instruments as well as electroacoustic tools to amplify and alienate the original sounds resulting in compositions characterized by textural density and huge impact Alex Buess has received various prizes and sabbatical years including those offered by the Musikkreditkommission of Basel City in 1992 and the Robert Thyll-Dürr Foundation in 1998. His studies include

acoustics Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...

musicology Musicology is the academic, research-based study of music, as opposed to musical composition or performance. Musicology research combines and intersects with many fields, including psychology, sociology, acoustics, neurology, natural sciences, ...

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

and

. He has appeared at various international festivals including

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (also known by the acronym HCMF, stylised since 2006 as the lowercase hcmf//) is a new music festival held annually in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. Since its foundation in 1978, it has featu ...

(England), Rostrum for Electroacoustic Music (Austrian / Swiss contribution 1997 Radio DRS 2), Tampere Festival (Finland), Musique Action Vandœuvres-les-Nancy (France), Taktlos 1993/95/96/2003 (CH), Tonart Festival 2000 (CH), Festival de Musica Contemporanea in Quito (Ecuador), and the Encuentro de Compositores Bolivianos in Sucre (Bolivia),

Lucerne Festival Lucerne Festival is one of the leading international festivals in the world of classical music and presents a series of classical music festivals based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Founded in 1938 by Ernest Ansermet and Walter Schulthess, it curr ...

(2005),

Warsaw Autumn Warsaw Autumn () is the largest international Polish festival of contemporary music. It was established in 1956 by two composers, Tadeusz Baird and Kazimierz Serocki, and officially established by the Head Board of the Polish Composers' Union ...

(2006), Donaueschingen Music Festival (2007), Tage für Neue Musik Zürich(2013) and various concerts and festivals in Japan, Australia and China. Buess’s work reflects his experience with electronic technology, written

contemporary music Contemporary music is whatever music is produced at the current time. Specifically, it could refer to: Genres or audiences * Adult contemporary music * British contemporary R&B * Christian adult contemporary * Christian contemporary hit radio * Con ...

film music A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film. The score comprises a number of orchestral, instrumental, or choral pieces called cues, which are timed to begin and end at specific points during the film in order to ...

, new mixing and production techniques and

computer music Computer music is the application of computing technology in music composition, to help human composers create new music or to have computers independently create music, such as with algorithmic composition programs. It includes the theory and ...

Discography (selection)

* Ice with Kevin Martin, Dave Cochrane, John Jobaggy, Justin Broadrick and Alex Buess. Title:'' Under The Skin''. Label: Pathological GB (1993) * ''Sprawl'' with Michael Wertmüller, Peter Brötzmann, Alex Buess, Stephan Wittwer and William Parker. Label: Trost, A (1997) * 16-17, title: ''

Gyatso Gyatso or Gyamtso (), is a Tibetan personal name meaning "ocean". It is also written ''Rgya-mtsho'' in Wylie transliteration, Gyaco in Tibetan pinyin, Gyatsho in Tournadre Simplified Phonetic Transcription and Gyatso in THDL Simplified Phonetic ...

'', Label: Pathological GB (1993), Reedition 2008: Savageland Records * God, title: '' The Anatomy of Addiction'', Label: Big Cat GB, USA (1994) * The Bug, title: ''Tapping the Conversation'' with Kevin Martin, Dave Cochrane, Simon Hopkins, Label: Wordsound USA (1995) * Phantom City, title: ''

Site Anubis ''Site Anubis'' is an album by Paul Schütze and Phantom City, released in 1996 through Big Cat Records. It is a concept album in which urban catastrophe is caused by an 800-foot statue of the Egyptian god Anubis. Background and recording Thou ...

'' with Paul Schütze, Raoul Björkenheim, Alex Buess, LolCoxhill, Bill Laswell and Dirk Wachtelaer, Label: Big Cat GB (1996) * Phantom City, title: '' Shiva Recoil: Live/Unlive'' at the Tampere Jazzfestival, Finland. Label: Virgin UK (1997) * Xasax Saxophon quartet: composition: ''Hyperbaton'', CD Erol 7019 by Xasax. Works by Donatoni, Xenakis, Cage, Aperghis, Wolpe, Buess, Essel und Rzewski. * Ensemble Phoenix Basel, title: ''Repulsion'': compositions: ''Maxwell’s Demon'' and ''Parallaxe A'', United Phoenix Records 001. Works by Dror Feiler, Tim Hodgkinson and Alex Buess.

Chamber music scores (selection)

* ''Ata-7'' for saxophone, live-electronics and

percussion A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a percussion mallet, beater including attached or enclosed beaters or Rattle (percussion beater), rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or ...

* ''Khat'' for bass-flute, percussion and live-electronics * ''Parallaxe A'' for large ensemble and 5-channeltape * ''X_Syn_Drome_1'' for

soprano A soprano () is a type of classical singing voice and has the highest vocal range of all voice types. The soprano's vocal range (using scientific pitch notation) is from approximately middle C (C4) = 261 Hertz, Hz to A5 in Choir, choral ...

, perkussion, live-electronics and tape * ''Metatron's cube'' for

clarinet The clarinet is a Single-reed instrument, single-reed musical instrument in the woodwind family, with a nearly cylindrical bore (wind instruments), bore and a flared bell. Clarinets comprise a Family (musical instruments), family of instrume ...

trombone The trombone (, Italian, French: ''trombone'') is a musical instrument in the Brass instrument, brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's lips vibrate inside a mouthpiece, causing the Standing wave, air c ...

, amplified violin, amplified violoncello, amplified doublebass and percussion * ''Phylum'' for solo perkussion, solo electronics, large ensemble and live-electronics * ''Ghosts of Schizophonia'' for double ensemble and live-electronics

Sources

External links

Alex Buess website

Alex Buess at discogs

Alex Buess at allmusic
{{DEFAULTSORT:Buess Alex Swiss composers Swiss male composers Male saxophonists Living people 1954 births Musicians from Basel-Stadt 21st-century Swiss saxophonists 21st-century male musicians 16-17 members