Ulrich Krieger

In 2017 Krieger composed "Finnegans Longstone," an adapted passage from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake for the Waywords and Meansigns project.

Metal Machine Trio began in 2008 together with Lou Reed and Sarth Calhoun as an experimental free rock project. In September 2007 he moved to California, where he is professor for composition and experimental sound practice at the California Institute of the Arts.

Krieger studied classical saxophone, composition, electronic music and musicology at the Manhattan School of Music (New York), the Universität der Künste (Berlin) and the Freie Universität (Berlin). He further pursued independent studies and research in the didjeridu and Australian Aboriginal music and culture. In his early years he studied in depth the contemporary music of the European post-war avant-garde and won related prices and residencies. Later he started to distinguish himself from the established New Music scene which in a 2007 interview he called "in a phase of mannerism and in a crisis".

The basic pattern of long tones and drones, which he worked on his walls of sound releases, is still a matter of exploration in his recent, more experimental and improvising formations. More recently he intensified his acoustic electronics saxophone approach in diverse experimental band projects. Text of Light is a 2001 founded formation with Lee Ranaldo and Alan Licht, performing along with films of experimental film maker Stan Brakhage (1933–2003).

In the early 1990s he started working on a more electronic approach. He began developing an original amplification for the saxophone and various live-electronic signal processing set-ups. In the electronic experimental field he collaborated with rock, noise and ambient artists like Karkowski, Merzbow, Koener, Toeplitz. He also worked with the Berlin ensemble "zeitkratzer" for which he transcribed Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. The original LP consists of one hour of guitar feedback noise. Although considered impossible Krieger scored the piece for amplified acoustic instruments, creating an orchestral work that had a new sound: classical chamber music instruments that sounded like electronic music. This arrangement has since then only been performed by the Great Learning Orchestra, Stockholm. Around the same time he started working with the 'silent music' composers, specially of the Wandelweiser group such as Malfatti, Beuger, and Pisaro.

Since the late 1980s he became more and more interested in American music and its different approaches (chance music, process music, just intonation, multi-stylistic, minimalism, drone). In 1991 he moved to New York. In the 'Cage of Saxophones' series Krieger recorded the complete saxophone and any-instrument works of John Cage for Mode Records.

Ulrich Krieger (born 1962 in Freiburg) is a German contemporary composer, performer, improviser and experimental rock musician based in Los Angeles.