Thomas Gerwin

Born in 1955, Thomas Gerwin is a classically trained composer, sound artist and improviser. He studied guitar and live electronics from 1975 to 1978 in Kassel, from 1978 to 1984 musicology with Georg von Dadelsen as well as German studies and linguistics with Gerd Fritz in Tübingen and Berlin; from 1987 to 1990 there followed artistic postgraduate studies in composition with a focus on electronic music in Stuttgart with Erhard Karkoschka, Ulrich Süße and David Mason. His work encompasses concert and performance music, acousmatic music, multichannel and live electronics, radio and film music as well as sound installations and sound objects for public space. He teaches improvisation and electroacoustic music at the exploratorium berlin. From 1990 to 1998 he worked at the ZKM Karlsruhe and helped to build up the audio library and the archive project IDEAMA there. In 2003 he founded the Institut für multisensoriale Kunst and his Berlin studio inter art project; he directed the Internationales Klangkunstfest Berlin, which he had founded, from 2004 to 2018, and since 2020 he has been responsible for the concert series “re-sonanz” at the KunstHaus Potsdam. He was awarded the Karl-Sczuka-Förderpreis in 1999, the radio play prize of the Akademie der Künste in 2007 and a sound art fellowship of the Berlin Senate in 2008; in 2022 he received a fellowship of the Deutscher Musikfonds. Three albums connect him with Cybele. Two of them are volumes of the DEGEM series, 90 Seconds of Reality (2005) and Orpheus 400 (2007); to these is added a contribution to the audiobook production Weht ein Stadtspaziergang durch den Traum (2014).