CRTTR TAKEOVER: LISE BARKAS + SIMON & TOBIAS LANZ

CRTTR
is a creature of many faces: superstar, trickster and failed poet. It slips through the cracks, its cells dividing, mutating, and reassembling in an endless cycle. Every now and then shedding its skin as it seeks new spaces to grow.

And just when you think you’ve figured it out, it changes again. CRTTR is an artist collective based in Bern that hijacks radio waves, transforms cultural spaces, and works with sound and images. We curate exhibitions, organize concerts, host radio shows, and publish selected experimental sound and printed works. CRTTR thrives on collaboration, moving playfully through different genres. It’s a space where artists, musicians, storytellers, designers, and curators meet and experiment together.

Lise Barkas
Lise Barkas is a Strasbourg-based bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy player who plunges listeners into a vivid and immersive world of sound. She has honed her instrumental craft in folk ball dances and noise gigs alike, navigating seamlessly between traditional contexts and experimental stages. Her playing is shaped by recent traditional music revivals as well as encounters with experimentalists and improvisers, joyfully combining the still-vibrant folklore of the bagpipes with extended techniques drawn from contemporary music. Haunting melodies emerge and dissolve into blown tones, scratches, complex multiphonics and whistling textures. Through these evolving continuums of sound, she reveals unexpected harmonic combinations and subtly redefines the notions of tradition associated with her instruments. Alongside her solo acoustic performances, she actively pursues collaborations with a wide range of musicians, including Yann Leguay, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy and Zoe Heselton.

Simon & Tobias Lanz
 

Simon & Tobias Lanz are a duo of composer-performers, artists and brothers. Working between drone music, experimental composition, and visual aesthetics. Simon Lanz designs and builds the duo’s custom wind instruments, while Tobias Lanz focus lies on the compositional and conceptual frameworks. Their practice is collaborative across all stages, merging instrument-making, composition, and performance into an integrated artistic process. Drawing inspiration from the pipe organ while deliberately departing from its tradition, they employ microtonal tuning systems and unconventional playing techniques to explore sonic territories beyond Western twelve-tone frameworks and classical organ timbres.