Anyone who joins Tedious Work for a performance (or even just a rehearsal) is automatically part of the band. In Kakophonie we set about finding singers, but since Tedious Work are an “experimental pop band” we wanted to find the best bad singers. The work Kakophonie set out with the seemingly simple task of teaching the world how to get better at singing worse. It’s not as easy as you might think. If you search YouTube for videos on how to sing worse you don’t get any hits.

The work developed into a series of extended “band practices” across Freiburg and Frankfurt a.M. where we developed and rehearsed a series of exercises, which saw activities such as trying to remember a pitch for an hour or more, singing in real shower cubicles brought onto the stage, transforming a mass of singers into a set of organ pipes reproducing the sounds heard in headphones played on a keyboard, blocking the ears and singing “together” etc.

Kakophonie - Ein Handbuch für schlechteren Gesang was a research project by Tedious Work in cooperation with Südufer-Chor Freiburg, Mousonturm Performance-Club, Südufer Freiburg & Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm funded with #TakeHeart Prozessförderung by Fonds Darstellende Künste.