30 years domizil records

an evenings with friends.

In 1996, a cassette was released as part of a sound installation by the fictitious label “domicile edition”. Thirty years later, the artist label run by Marcus Maeder and Bernd Schurer looks back on a catalogue of more than fifty releases. domizil emerged from Zurich’s techno and experimental music scene of the 1990s, when the first affordable laptops made it possible to produce electronic music at home, in one’s own “domicile”. To this day, the label stands for a curious, non-academic approach to computer music at the intersection of electronic music, field recording and the visual arts, increasingly engaging with environmental reflection, generative art, data sonification, ambient poetics, acoustic ecology and artistic research.

domizil celebrates its anniversary in Berlin with us at silent green, where the label previously celebrated its 20th anniversary. On 12 December, farmersmanual, Rashad Becker, Asmus Tietchens, Noémi Büchi, Normification, Benjamin Flesser and Jedan Nula will perform. Normification is a project by Florian Hecker and Marcin Pietruszewski. Jedan Nula, the duo of Bernd Schurer and Marcus Maeder, will present its anniversary release.

The evening brings together long-standing companions and new voices from Zurich and Berlin, from the pioneers of glitch and computer music to a younger generation of Swiss composers. It is a celebration with friends and, at the same time, a look ahead: domizil will continue to be active in both Zurich and Berlin.

Saturday, December 12
Kuppelhalle
Doors: 6:30 pm / Start: 7 pm
Tickets
 

farmersmanual
farmersmanual  is an electronic music and visual art group formed in Vienna in the mid-1990s. The core of the loosely organised collective comprises Mathias Gmachl, Stefan Possert, Oswald Berthold, Gert Brantner and Nik Gaffney. With No Backup (1996), the first full-length production of the Viennese label Mego, and releases on Tray and OR, farmersmanual became a defining voice of early laptop and computer music. Live performance is at the heart of their work: improvised, networked, often streamed over the internet and combined with real-time visuals, network visualisation and sonification.

Rashad Becker
For more than three decades, the Syrian-German composer, musician and mastering engineer has worked across experimental music, clubs, film, theatre and fine art while developing an electronic language entirely his own. Becker’s compositions unfold as crowded synthetic narratives, with sounds behaving almost like characters: interacting, competing, yielding and mutating through strange, tragicomic and often uncanny forms. His 2025 album The Incident, his first full-length solo release in almost a decade and the inaugural release on his label Clunk, was conceived as a labyrinthine “pseudo musical” concerned with information, representation, witnessing and documentation. 

Jedan Nula
Jedan Nula – Serbo-Croatian for “one-zero” – is the Zurich- and Berlin-based duo of Marcus Maeder and Bernd Schurer. It combines electronic music with field recordings to create processed, expanded sound worlds. “Critical Ambient”, as the two describe their practice, does not merely create atmosphere but plays with sonic meaning and makes audible the friction between synthetic sounds and real recordings. Natural sounds are cut up, looped or digitally distorted, evoking themes such as urbanisation, climate change or surveillance. Unlike conventional ambient music, “Critical Ambient” may unsettle, demanding active listening: What is still “real”? How does technology shape our perception? What relationships might exist between the artificial and the natural?

Noémi Büchi
Noémi Büchi is a Swiss-French composer and sound artist working between contemporary electronic and electroacoustic composition and performance. She combines electroacoustic orchestral abstraction, analogue synthesis and raw noise into expansive, finely detailed sound architectures. Alongside concerts, she creates audiovisual works and commissions for film, dance, installation and fashion. Her work has been presented at festivals such as CTM, MUTEK, Ars Electronica, L.E.V. and Nuits Sonores, as well as at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Pavillon Le Corbusier in Zurich. She lives and works between Basel, Zurich and Paris.

Asmus Tietchens
Born in 1947 and based in Hamburg, composer and synthesizer experimentalist Asmus Tietchens has been active since the mid-1960s and has influenced several generations of electronic musicians and sound artists. Inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen, his work pursues “absolute music”, exploring rigorous formal structures, abstract sound research and musique concrète. He has released more than 100 recordings, including collaborations with Merzbow, Vidna Obmana and Thomas Köner. Alongside his musical practice, he has taught acoustics at universities in Hamburg since 1990 and written liner notes for releases on the Bureau B label.

NORMIFICATION
NORMIFICATION is a project initiated in 2016 by Florian Hecker, Marcin Pietruszewski and the graphic design studio NORM, comprising Dimitri Bruni, Manuel Krebs and Ludovic Varone. It translates graphic design methods and algorithmic structures into sound synthesis and composition. At its core is the reciprocal movement between data and sound, from graphic algorithm to sonic event and back to structured data. The project explores how structure, perception and sonic material interact, treating sound as an ongoing process of algorithmic transformation.

Benjamin Flesser
Benjamin Flesser is a Berlin-based composer, live electronic music performer, sound designer and instrument builder. He works with analogue and hybrid modular synthesizers, as well as custom-built and modified electronics, and has designed several hundred systems for studios, performances and environmental sensing installations. His work has been presented at venues and festivals including Berlin Atonal, Blurred Edges Hamburg and silent green. His artistic and research projects have received support from funding bodies including Musikfonds and Pro Helvetia. Since 2021, he has taught bachelor’s and master’s students. In 2016, he founded Hyperlinear, a concert series featuring recurring collaborations with NK Project.
 

With the support of Pro Helvetia.