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An artist with a 30+ year career and an uncompromising reputation that reflects the
emotional specificity of his uneasy, yet compelling sound, maintained throughout his
expansive discography, Sten was an intriguing choice for such a project. Although he
attended art school, training in electronic music and sound art, he had little experience
with acoustic instruments and can neither read nor write music notation. Yet he’s been
engaged with Partch’s music, and outsider art more generally, since he was a teenager. His
resulting piece/composition for the project was originally intended only for performance by
Cologne-based Ensemble Musikfabrik, for a series of concerts in five European cities
between 2015 and 2018. It’s Musikfabrik that undertook the painstaking, expensive process
of building an entire set of the composer’s creations – the second only to the originals built
by Partch himself. They are the professional musicians and virtuosic instrumentalists that
had to re-train and re-educate on these unknown and experimental sound sculptures in
non-standard tunings. And they house this large, gorgeous physical instrumentarium and
deal with the enormous logistics of working with it, sometimes shipping the fragile pieces
to other locales via semi-trucks or ships.