Christoph Schiller
Hyazo
A new album from the trio who released Tse in 2016, and - along with violinist Angharad Davies - Awire in 2018. Three compositions of quiet and delicate beauty, two by Christoph Schiller, and the title track by Cyril Bondi.Cyril Bondi: Indian harmoniumPierre-Yves Martel: viola da gambaChristoph Schiller: spinet
Unconscious Collections
Unconscious Collections emerges as a resonant dialogue between Tomás Cabado’s classical guitar and Christoph Schiller’s prepared spinet, both artists known for their work within experimental, microtonal, and Wandelweiser-inspired aesthetics. The album consists of pieces co-composed and performed by the duo, recorded during a period of close collaboration in Switzerland. Through a process that blends score-based direction and improvisational openness, Cabado and Schiller achieve a rare degree of …
Zeitweise Leitcher Schneefall
**300 copies** "One aim of improvised music is to create unprecedented sounds. And by specializing in the textures that can be extracted from the spinet, the piano’s 18th Century ancestor, keyboardist Christoph Schiller, who now divides his time between Basel and Weil am Rhein is firmly involved in this trope. On this hushed, microtonal CD, Schiller applies his tweaking of the traditional keyboard to responsive sounds from an instrument as venerable as his, Anouck Genthon’s violin on Zeitweise L…
Awirë
awirë stands as a luminous act of collective listening and minimalism, conceived by Cyril Bondi, Pierre-Yves Martel, and Christoph Schiller - veterans of exploratory small-group improvisation - and further energized by the searching violin of Angharad Davies. The recording merges the intimacy of chamber music with techniques of indeterminacy and radical reduction, using the distinctive timbres of Indian harmonium, viola da gamba, prepared spinet, and violin to weave an uncanny sonic fabric. Bond…
Tse
Tse, a collaboration between Cyril Bondi, Pierre-Yves Martel, and Christoph Schiller, offers five tracks of immersive, slow-burning chamber music at the intersection of composition and improvisation. Using harmonium, viola da gamba, and prepared spinet, the trio develops an original timbral palette - drones, delicate chord changes, and subtle percussive textures unfold through extended forms. Rather than relying on conventional melody or virtuosic gesture, Bondi, Martel, and Schiller favor proce…
Spinet and Violin
Spinet & Violin captures an extended, unedited improvisation by Christoph Schiller and Morgan Evans-Weiler, recorded at Schiller’s workshop in Basel during Evans-Weiler’s European tour. In this single-track work, the duo operates with rare intensity and mutual instinct, favouring gradual permutations of pitch and the slow revelation of timbre. Schiller’s prepared spinet, played with plucking, muting, and inside techniques, forms a delicate alloy with Evans-Weiler’s violin, which hovers between f…
Spinet, 2016
Christoph Schiller, spinet.
Christoph Schiller was born in 1963 in Stuttgart. He studied fine arts at the Kunstakademie Stuttgart and HfBK Hamburg. He later studied piano with Daniel Cholette and music theory in Basel. He has been playing concerts of improvised music on piano since 1987. In recent years the piano has been abandoned in favour of the lighter spinet, for which he has developed specific playing techniques which are influenced by inside piano techniques. Besides keyboard instruments …
Variations
Variations (Another Timbre) showcases Swiss composer-performer Christoph Schiller at the spinet, piano, and with a select arsenal of amplified objects. Across seven “variations,” Schiller explores a unique hybrid of structured improvisation and predetermined material, recording pairs of pieces for spinet, objects, and piano, then layering them in sequence - a “chain fashion” that blurs identity and authorship. The result is not conventional variation form, but a process of emergence, immersion, …
Kolk
Kolk (Another Timbre) offers a rare encounter between Hamburg trumpeter Birgit Ulher and Swiss spinet innovator Christoph Schiller. Recorded in Hamburg in 2010, these five improvisations draw on the duo’s deep engagement with non-idiomatic sound: Ulher works with her trumpet as a physical resonator, channeling air, static, speaker hum, radio noise, and objects, while Schiller’s prepared spinet spills out fleeting melodic cells, clicks, muted thuds, and spectral overtone clouds. Their collaborati…
Luftwurzeln
Old and new. This new CD on Matchless by Sebastian Lexer and Christoph Schiller keeps bringing these opposite ends of a spectrum to mind. If Schiller has taken an old instrument, a spinet, and approached it in new ways, then so has Lexer, whose Piano+ digital enhancements of a standard grand piano are as exciting a new development to that instrument as I have seen in years. The music on Luftwurzeln then also spans across that same wide divide. Improvised music in London has been evolving …
Grape Skin
Grape Skin is the focused outcome of a trio session between Michel Doneda, Jonas Kocher, and Christoph Schiller in a Zurich space, 2011. Doneda’s soprano sax curves and stirs in threadlike whispers, multiphonics, and percussive pops; Kocher’s accordion sustains microtonal clusters, gentle drones, or sudden detours; Schiller turns his spinet into a source of prepared sonorities, glancing harmonics, and tactile staccato. The approach is neither meditative minimalism nor crowded abstraction - it's …
Giles U.
An improbable yet utterly compelling duo pairing tuba and spinet – two instruments rarely heard together in musical history, brought into dialogue by German tubaist Carl Ludwig Hübsch and Swiss spinet player Christoph Schiller. Recorded in Cologne in November 2009, Giles U. documents seven pieces that explore the sonic possibilities of this unconventional combination, creating what one critic aptly described as "the kind of thing you might hear if a steampunk novel became sound."
Hübsch, a major…