Biography

" Somewhere in-between John Cage, Helmut Lachenmann and British guitarist Derek Bailey (Georg Pepl, HNA 2016)"

Joshua Weitzel is a musician, curator and academic, born in 1989.

He is improvising, composing and performing on guitar, shamisen and - occasionally - tenor banjo, mostly in the field of experimental music, contemporary jazz and the grey areas in-between. His music is mainly concerned with exploration of contrast, abstract harmony and dynamics and employs a wide array of extended playing techniques.


He is founder of Contemporary Shamisen Duo together with shamisen Master Ryota Saito and Ensemble for Experimental Chamber Music Kassel/Interrogation Quartet, which debuted at the Tage Neuer Musik in Weimar festival in 2018.

He has worked with many musicians in free improvisation and experimental music and collaborated with artists from various other disciplines such as performance, dance, poetry, painting and film. Besides experimental music, he also occasionally plays Jazz from the tradition of the 1920s and 1930s and from the tradition of Free and Avantgarde Jazz.

In academia, his research lies on the intersection of musicology, art history, and education. He holds a masters degree with distinction from King’s College London and a bachelors Degree from Göttingen University. From September 2019 he is a PhD student at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, where he writes about sound in the context of the history of documenta-exhibitions.

Aside from being an active performer with concerts worldwide, he has numerous professional experiences in the cultural industries, including festival organisation, exhibition curating and gallery education. His concert series „Chamäleon Konzerte“ and its spin-offs Chamäleon-Experimente and Chamäleon Clash have become hotspots for experimental music in Kassel. He is also the artistic director of the exhibition and performance space 'Galerie Feiertag' in Kassel.

During his time in London he regularly attended Eddie Prévost’s Improvisation Workshop.