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Saturday, 17 Oct 2026 • Doors 18:30

Stadtgarten

Venloer Straße 40

19:00Jon Elbaz Quartet
20:30Fred Moten + Brandon Lopez
22:00The Handover
23:30Carrier

Protomaps © OpenStreetMap

What happens when a quartet stops treating rhythm, synchronisation and musical “togetherness” as fixed coordinates? For New York composer and pianist **Jon Elbaz**, the answer lies somewhere between late- Romantic composition, Black American music, modernism, rock, pop and the unruly possibilities of improvisation. His music moves through dense structures and sudden gaps, intricate rhythmic designs and clouds of texture – less interested in pristine resolution than in the strange, unstable spaces that emerge when different musical languages begin to overlap. At the centre is a quartet of musicians who know how to navigate that terrain: saxophonist Matt Knoegel, bassist Thorbjørn Stefansson´ and percussionist James Paul Nadien. Elbaz calls them his “certified plumbers”: the right people for the job, requiring little explanation of how, what or why. Their first European concert comes to Three Skies in Cologne – a meeting point for composed detail, collective intuition and music that refuses to stay in its designated place. Come closer. Listen for what happens in between.

Fred Moten is a Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He has had a large number of poetry collections published and is a MacArthur Fellowship winner for his “new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics, cultural production, and social life.” Brandon Lopez, meanwhile, is a New York-based double bassist, an instructor of improvisation and double bass at the New School for Jazz and celebrated for his improvisational work, which is very much in evidence throughout Revision as he unlocks new sonic territories while his instrument simultaneously leaves room for Moten to weave a magical dialogue. Both artists trade in idiosyncratic assemblage, putting together something infinitely elaborate, and then somehow making it look so easy, impossibly natural, like primordial ooze descending. For the hour of Revision, they sound bound to one another, locked into something bigger than mere collaboration - a conclave of sheer art. Just as Moten has been pushing against the stodgy walls of academia, so has López been against musical composition. Their collaboration was a display of activism, a celebration of civil empathy and unrest.

Oud, violin and keyboard – three instruments meeting in a music that seems to move between Cairo, psychedelia and somewhere entirely unexpected. The Handover brings together Aly Eissa, Ayman Asfour and Jonas Cambien in a trio rooted in Egyptian musical traditions but resistant to the idea of musical fusion as a simple mixture of styles. There is no drummer. Rhythm emerges from the oud and keyboard; long violin lines stretch across the music; keyboards drift between electronic haze, ecstatic repetition and sudden rhythmic acceleration. Traditional gestures become increasingly abstract until they seem to hover between folk music, minimalism and psychedelic improvisation. Their debut on Sublime Frequencies consists of only two long pieces, allowing ideas to develop slowly and transform organically rather than being compressed into conventional song structures. At Three Skies, The Handover offers a rare kind of listening experience: music in which tradition is not quoted, but transformed from within – gradually, patiently and with an unmistakably physical sense of movement.

What if club music becomes architecture? As Carrier, British producer Guy Brewer strips electronic music to its essential materials: bass, space, rhythm, texture and motion. Deep frequencies hanging in the room. Dub echoes stretching into the far distance. Rhythms emerging only to dissolve again, leaving traces rather than obvious rhythms or beats. Carrier’s music is as spatial as it is physical, but never simply functional – closer to a sonic and rhythmical environment you enter than to a sequence of tracks. Known for his work as Shifted and his involvement in the darker corners of contemporary techno, Brewer departs on a different route with Carrier. Pressure gives way to depth, and propulsion to suspension.

Information

Tickets

The following passes and tickets are available for online purchase:
Festival Pass
Day Pass Thursday 15 Oct
Day Pass Friday 16 Oct
Clubnight@Gewölbe 16 Oct
Day Pass Saturday 17 Oct
Supporter Pass

Box office tickets for individual events are available at the venues.

Venues

Gewölbe, Hans-Böckler-Platz 2 – website
JAKI, Venloer Straße 40 – website
Klosterkirche Heilig Kreuz, Lindenstraße 45
Stadtgarten, Venloer Straße 40 – website
Stoff-Pavillon Möller, Hahnenstraße 8
Theater im Bauturm, Aachener Str. 24-26 – website

Volunteers

Three Skies is looking for volunteer staff members. Interested in helping us during the festival? Join the team!
Register now!

Contact

Three Skies – Unexpected Music and Sound
Zentrum für Aktuelle Musik e.V.
c/o Kutschker
Kurfürstenstraße 6
50678 Köln
info@threeskies.de

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Funded by

Musikfonds

Supported by

TheWire