Michael Fischer is a Viennes musician-composer-instant composition conductor who works on the immanence of language within sounds, their sculptural and dramatic evidence, mainly on the tenor saxophone and the violin. He is known for the duo BAGG*FISH with Ageneyinian, Netherlands-based drummer Marcos Baggiani and as the leader of the Vienna Improvisers Orchestra since its foundation twenty years ago, where he practices an individual hand-sign, instant composition conducting, similar to Butch Morris’ «conductions».

Fischer has been developing the innovative concept of the feedback saxophone – his amplified tenor sax connected to electro-acoustic feedback – since 1999. Feed Back Saxo Fone is his third solo sax album, following Solos (Extraplatte, 2002) and Night (Small Forms, 2021). The last two albums focus on the unstable feedback textures created with the saxophone, a solo practice that already won the appreciation of enthusiastic audiences.

The feedback saxophone is strictly analog, with no processing or effects; it is a microphone capsule in the saxophone tube, connected with a rudimentary pre-amp plugged into a basic mixer, which sends the signal to the front-of-house sound system and an on-stage, on-site available feedback-trigger-speaker. It contextualizes the saxophone as/within an ephemeral sound-noise-speech sculpture, expands the sonic palette of the saxophone into otherworldly resonant and percussive spaces, and transforms its range into a twisted, noisy electric guitar, or an alien percussive orchestra speaking in a cryptic lingo. Add to that, the possessive intensity of Fischer’s playing, his specific techniques of feedback-textures’ metaphors of sound, his sonic imagination, and his great experience as a composer and improviser and you get a one-of-a-kind, unpredictable listening experience.

Eyal Hareuveni

Michael Fischer (saxophone)