Sonderberg

by François Couture
The story of Adam Sonderberg is one of a youngster Chicagoan exploring all kinds of music in his basement, releasing many albums on his own cassette label, and how a couple of up-and-coming improvisers picked up on him and encouraged him to perform live and stop hiding. Mainly interested in the assembly of sounds from a concrete music perspective, his music draws from the sound art of Francisco López, the extended guitar technique of Derek Bailey, and the sparseness and quietness of the Morton Feldman-inspired microsound esthetics of the late '90s (composers like Bernhard Günter, improvisers like Taku Sugimoto). He also performs occasionally on tabletop guitar with Fred Lonberg-Holm, Boris Hauf, and TV Pow.
Sonderberg was born in 1978 in Chicago, IL. Precocious in talent and in tastes, he is self-taught on piano, guitar, and drums. He started playing guitar in garage bands (Anonymous, the Unknown Band) at age 14 and creating tape music a year later. In 1993, he started the cassette label Longbox Recordings (a CD-R label since 1998) and since then has been outpouring many albums per year, most in ultra-limited editions. After going to an AMM concert in 1997 and getting to talk to guitarist Keith Rowe afterwards, he shifted his focus on the tabletop guitar and electro-acoustic improv. Regular partners at the time included Sam Dellaria, A.P. O'Brien, and Greg Hamilton. Monikers under which he recorded with them (and others) have included the James Joyce Memorial Orchestra, the New Music Workshop, and Sac Trio.
In 1998, Sonderberg met Fred Lonberg-Holm. The cellist, who was already becoming a key figure on the Chicago new music scene, pushed him to perform live and helped him network with the free improv community, inviting him to join the Lightbox Orchestra briefly. The two recorded Music of the Late Romantics for Longbox (1999), which helped introduce the label to a slightly wider public. At the same time, Sonderberg struck a musical relationship with Austrian saxophonist Boris Hauf. They perform and record whenever he visits the U.S. The two toured the Midwest in the spring of 2002, occasionally with guests like TV Pow and Jon Mueller. The 2001 solo EP Say No was the artist's first album to gather attention from the international specialized press.