Stefan Fraunberger

Stefan Fraunberger is an Austrian artist and composer, exploring themes related to transformation and liminality in sound. Stefan engages in electro/acoustic dialog with different instruments and conceptions through translation, composition, performance, or writing.

He focuses on schemes of perception relating the discontinuity of geometries and languages beyond nature and culture. By investigating embodied understandings of the unthinkable, his work touches on time, periphery, memory, and transience.

Approaching music as an otherworldly dialect relating physical entities and interior states of being lies at the core of his research concerning the connection between human and non-human, between material and spiritual domains.

Fraunberger holds a degree in electroacoustic music and a diploma in Arabic language, Oriental Studies, and Euro-Philosophy from the University of Vienna. He wrote a thesis on 12th century conceptions of liminality, comparing pre-modern Sufi cosmology to contemporary sonic agency, including Arab-German translations of key passages. Stefan is speaking several European and non-European tongues.

Based in Vienna, he has lived and worked in Aleppo, Sana’a, London, Tehran, Sibiu, Benares, and Brussels for social work, research, residencies, and studies. Since 2008, he has carried sonic research in deserted Saxon churches in Central Transylvania – his long term project “Quellgeister” is dealing with the influence of the non-human on terrestrial organ-machines. His album “Quellgeister #1” was released in 2014 by chmafu nocords. “Wurmloch” (LP), the second part of the series, was released in 2016 by Interstellar Records and has received international critical acclaim.

Fraunberger frequently performs with different hammered dulcimers and electrons, and he creates installations, compositional concepts for instruments and electricity, as well as soundtracks for selected movies and performance pieces. He attended a variety of residencies, he has received the Austrian scholarship for composition, he took part in “shape-platform 2017,” and he has developed commisioned pieces for different contexts. His work was presented at Donaufestival, Krems; CTM Festival, Berlin; Tadaex and Radical Tehran, Tehran; Musikprotokoll, Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Outernational Days, Bucharest; UH-Fest, Budapest; Les Brigittines, Bruxelles; DNK-Days Amsterdam; Imago Dei, Klangraum Krems; and others.