Info
PEOPLE
Berliners Michael Griener (drums/vib) & jayrope (electronics/git) are Kimmo Elomaa since 2000. Musical backgrounds of both lie in jazz, classical music, avantgarde, electronica, composition as well as improvisation, in various contexts ranging from free music via ensemble & solo works to music for performance arts.
Michael Griener’s background
jayrope’s background
APPROACH
Kimmo Elomaa’s music is physical and draws from live-to-two-track improvisation. This while current work indicates, that there’ll be preconceived, edited and/or overdubbed works in future recordings as well. The two prominently research in playing a feedbacking drum ▶ microphone ▶ electronics ▶ speaker -chain (both directions). This setup fuels a real-time cosm of urgency, sparse here, dense there. Note: No computers on stage.
HISTORY
Michael Griener & jayrope met in May 1999 in Berlin as hired guns for a European tour of Kip Hanrahan with Cuban & Berlin musicians. Then followed two shows with Thomas Borgmann at Berliner Jazzfest 1999 and the 13e Rencontres Internationales de d‘jazz de Nevers – both as part of the Borgmann’s group Alliance.
They continued to work as a duo under the name Kimmo Elomaa.
Duo recordings in March 2001 got awarded with a funding price of the Berlin Senator for Cultural Affairs. So they continued to record more in February 2002, engineered by Rainer Robben (greatly missed). Both sessions were mixed by Mark Bihler & jayrope in 2003/2021, available today as their debut album RAW.
Today Kimmo Elomaa are rehearsing and recording their second album, funded by Musikfond e.V., Berlin.
NAME
An evening walk with a fresh-born returned a business card, stuck between two harbour wall bricks in a seaside village in the South of Canary island Tenerife.
A hilarious front-side image ended up being scanned & duplicated, with faces of MG & jrp edited into it. We named ourselves after the person on the business card & resisted much to find out, who that really was. Found info indicated, that there was a celebrity person, whom we don’t have much in common with.