KALLA SOUND is the creative project space for multi-media artist, Michaela Catranis. In her work, Michaela explores the boundaries between music and other disciplines, using technology (Diluvian) and a variety of art forms (i sing the body electric, Liquid Rainbow) to augment her acoustic core. Musically speaking, she derives inspiration from her classical training as well as non-classical sonorities that she’s collected from her travels and connection to nature. The natural habitats and musical traditions she experienced while living in Lebanon and East Africa have had a profound influence on her writing. Best described as both poetic and jarring, kalla sound combines delicate lyricism and polyphonic textures with explosive, sometimes brutal auditory gestures; a sound world that spins out in a lively exchange of disciplines and varied musical practices, deeply rooted in the process of collective artmaking.
Her works have been performed in concert halls such as the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Berliner Philharmonie, Wigmore Hall and the KKL Lucerne. In 2018, she won the TONALi18 composition prize for her solo cello work Jeita. The following year, she received the Contemporary Arts Alliance-Berlin Scholarship (2019). Most recently, Michaela was elected to the International Ensemble Modern Academy Composition Seminar 2019-2020 as well as to the Académie Voix Nouvelles - Royaumont 2019 where she was selected as composer laureate and commissioned to write for the MIVOS Quartet, “one of America's most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles” (The Chicago Reader). Other highlights from 2020-21 include commissions from the RIOT Ensemble, Zafraan Ensemble, VIVAstrings and Berlin-based duos, Chwastyk/Szambelan and Saviet/Houston.
She is an advocate of ecologically sensitive poetics, a concept that has fuelled many of her more recent works (the ghosts in these trees, Tierlied/leid, Song of a lonely whale).
Michaela holds degrees in piano performance (Peabody Conservatory, Bremen University of the Arts) and composition (Hanns Eisler School of Music). She lives and works in Berlin where she founded inter-disciplinary performance ensemble menajiri.
"Das Klavierspiel von Catranis ist bereits einen Besuch wert. Durch die visuelle Unterstützung und die Tanzperformance kriegt das Ganze aber noch einen ganz besonderen Charme. So haben wir ein Konzert auch noch nicht erlebt!"
Jan-Martin Bauer, Geheimtipp Hamburg
"Und entlassen wurde das Publikum nach all dem Spektakel und Wettkampfclinch mit einem Stück für Solovioloncello, gespielt vom ersten Preisträger: dem ebenfalls aus einem (Kompositions-) Wettbewerb hervorgegangenen „Jeita“ der in Berlin lebenden Michaela Rea Catranis, so etwas wie ein musikalisches Höhlengleichnis, welthaltige Meditation als tönend-bewegte Narration einer einzelnen, einsamen Stimme. Mit so einem mutigen Appell an die Innenwelt endete das „TONALi“-Großereignis in der Elbphilharmonie."
Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, Edition Faust-Kultur
"In Michaela Catranis' «Pulse» findet Rihms Idee für das Kompositionsseminar besondere Entsprechung, da sich hier der Interpret Simon Thompson als ein emphatischer Vermittler der schlüssigen Partitur gibt."
Michelle Ziegler, Neue Zürcher Zeitung-NZZ
“Michaela Catranis is a unique voice for contemporary art in this interdisciplinary context. MENAJIRI’s premiere of Liquid Rainbow was an imaginative and innovative experience; highly sensory as well as provocative in dialogue between various disciplines.”
Joolz Gale, conductor/ensemble mini founder
