Dirk Rothbrust & Jan St. Werner

What if listening were less about recognizing sounds than about finding your way through them? *Music for Commons Sensed++* brings together musicians from different practices and musical worlds to explore sound as a shared, unstable experience. Echos, glitches, resonances and artefacts move to the foreground; melody and rhythm become only part of a larger field in which the room, the loudspeakers, the performers and the listener continuously reshape one another. At the centre of this concert are two radically different but closely connected approaches to sound. Dirk Rothbrust, percussionist and member of Ensemble Musikfabrik and Schlagquartett Köln, has spent decades expanding the sonic possibilities of percussion - treating every instrument less as a fixed object than as a field of potential. His work has inspired compositions by artists including Rebecca Saunders and Enno Poppe. Jan St. Werner, known internationally as one half of Mouse on Mars, works across electronic music, composition, sound art and installation. His projects repeatedly dissolve the boundaries between music, architecture and visual art, turning sound into a spatial and perceptual material. Together they present three works for percussion and electronics: central spark in the dark (2018), commissioned by WDR, places acoustic percussion inside a multi-channel electronic space where no single point can claim to be the centre. Stück für Stücke (2020) continues this exploration, while Martial Partial (2026) pushes it further: rhythms condense and fracture, sonic identities dissolve, and the barely audible beginnings of sounds are magnified into explosive, microscopic events.