Alexandre Babel
Composition
Alexandre Babel (Geneva, 1980)
Alexandre Babel is a Swiss composer, percussionist and curator based in Berlin. He is involved in various contemporary contexts encompassing modern classical music, free improvisation performance art and visual arts. His work explores purely acoustic sound and blurs the boundaries between contemporary music and electronic aesthetics, through virtuoso instrumental technique. His innovative projects break through the borders of musical convention, confounding listener expectations in the conquest of new contexts.
2013 to 2022 artistic director of the contemporary percussion ensemble Eklekto, 2009-2019 principal percussionist of the Ensemble KNM Berlin, co-founder of the performance collective Radial. He has worked with ensembles and artists such as Ensemble Musikfabrik, Schlagquartett Köln, NeueVokalsolisten, Anthony Pateras, Caspar Brötzmann, Carol Robinson, Felicia Atkinson, Tristan Perich, Ryoji Ikeda.
His has become composition commissions by GRM Paris, Mozarteum Salzburg, Archipel Festival, Biennale Son Sion and his works have been performed in various venues and festivals, including Oberlin University, the Teatro San Martin in Buenos Aires, IPEA Festival Shanghai. He has taught at the HSMLU Luzern, the HEM in Geneva, the Melbourne University and the UdK in Berlin.
In 2020 the monographic Festival Les Amplitudes in La Chaux-de-Fonds focusses in Babel’s compositional and curatorial work and in 2022 he works as a co-curator for Latifa Echakhch’s exhibition at the swiss Pavillon of the Venice art Biennal.
Babel is a laureate of the Swiss Music Prize 2021.