Anne La Berge's passion for the extremes in both composed and improvised music has led her to the fringes of storytelling and sound art as her sources of musical inspiration.
She performs internationally as a multimedia musician and is one of the composer/performers in the Amsterdam based ensemble MAZE. She works as an improvisation and live electronics coach worldwide and currently teaches at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague.
From 1999 - 2006 she produced the Kraakgeluiden, an internationally renown improvisation series based in Amsterdam, that explored combinations of acoustic and electronic instruments using real-time interactive performance systems. La Berge’s own music evolved in parallel and beyond where the flute has become only one element in a sound world that includes electronic audio, live processing and spoken text often embedded with social and political comment.
She can be heard on the Largo, Artifact, Etcetera, Hat Art, Frog Peak, Einstein, X-OR, Unsounds, Canal Street, Rambo, esc.rec., Intackt, Data, verz, Real Music House, Relative Pitch, Carrier, Present Sounds Recordings and Splendor Amsterdam labels. Her music is published by Frog Peak Music and Alry Publications; and her Max-patch based compositions are available from her privately.
She is a founding artist of the Splendor Amsterdam collective of musicians who have transformed an old bathhouse in Amsterdam into a cultural mecca, where she regularly produces and shares small scale concerts with international guests, and she is the director of the Volsap Foundation that produces innovative music projects and international tours.
The miracle of her sound technique is supported by, among other things, different lip-positions, attacks, ways of breathing, distance from the microphone – everything has been foreseen and elaborated. . . Her textures are often two-voiced. It is all so complicated that it defies description and yet it sounds very natural, like a bird’s song. Muusika, Tallin
La Berge is a precursor of some of the important things contemporary composition has now come to mean.
The Wire