Grand Prix at Cod.Act
The 2019 Swiss Grand Prix for Music was awarded to Cod.Act: André and Michel Décosterd, two brothers who explore the interactions between sound, image and space, renewing the perception of contemporary music. Fourteen musicians or ensembles also received a Swiss Music Prize.
Born in Le Locle in 1967 and 1969, André and Michel Décosterd occupy an original place within the artistic productions grouped under the generic term of "sound art". After an apprenticeship as an organ builder and a diploma from the Ecole de Jazz et de Musique Actuelle de Lausanne (Ejma), musician-composer André Décosterd specialized in computer music and studied composition systems specific to electroacoustic and contemporary music. Michel Décosterd holds a degree in architecture from the Ecole d'ingénieurs de Bienne. He soon concentrated on his activities as a visual artist and photographer. He also developed an in-depth self-taught knowledge of mechanics and machine building, leading him to design kinetic sculptures. Since 1997, the two brothers have combined their talents under the name Cod.Act to create astonishing musical and architectural forms whose aesthetic evokes the industrial world. They present their work at digital creation festivals around the world, and have won prestigious awards including the Golden Nica Interactive Art at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, and the Grand Prize (Art division) at the Japan Media Arts Festival on three occasions.
The Swiss Music Prizes are...
The following 14 musicians or ensembles also received a Swiss Music Prize: Bonaventure - Soraya Lutangu (Rougemont VD), d'incise - Laurent Peter, (Geneva), Pierre Favre (Le Locle), Ils Fränzlis da Tschlin (Engadine, GR), Béatrice Graf (Nyon), Michael Jarrell (Geneva), Kammerorchester Basel (Basel), KT Gorique (Sion), Les Reines Prochaines (Basel), Rudolf Lutz (St. Gallen), Björn Meyer (Bern), Andy Scherrer (Brunnadern SG), Sebb Bash (Lausanne) and Marco Zappa (Locarno).
All musical genres are represented among the winners, from jazz to contemporary music, from hip hop to rap, from classical to popular music. This year, however, the focus is on electronic music in all its facets. And for the first time, a Swiss Music Prize will be awarded to an orchestra.
Awards ceremony
The awards ceremony will take place on September 20 at Basel's Kunstmuseum, in the presence of Federal Councillor Alain Berset. Some of the prizewinners will be featured in Basel's ZeitRäume festival, which will present a program dedicated to music and architecture from September 13 to 22.
Procedure for selecting the winners
Every year, the Federal Office of Culture commissions a dozen music experts to nominate candidates from all regions of the country and from all fields of music. This selection is then submitted to the Federal Music Jury. In January 2019, the seven-member jury selected the winning duo for the Swiss Grand Prix and the 14 Swiss Music Prize winners. The Swiss Grand Prix is endowed with CHF 100,000, and the Swiss Music Prizes with CHF 25,000 each.
Photo: Sound City, Cod.Act's latest sound installation, consists of an old guitar amp whose body has been replaced by a strange mechanical prosthesis, suspended from the ceiling by two springs. It plays a dark, tortured rock track.
