tickets:
regular: 14,- €uro
students, disabled persons: 7,- €uro
doors: 7.30 pm CEST
concert starts:
approx. 8.00 pm CEST
From: 05/2025 – In the beginning there was a Steamboat…
https://www.loftkoeln.de/en/05-2025-in-the-beginning-there-was-a-steamboat/
Back when people still wrote letters, sent demo CDs or faxes, or simply made phone calls, Marino Pliakas, a member of the trio Steamboat Switzerland, called me and asked if I had listened to the CD he had sent me. “Not yet, but Steamboat sounds more like Dixieland jazz to me, and the LOFT isn’t the right place for that,” was my reply. Anyone familiar with the music of Steamboat Switzerland will realize how wrong I was, so I listened to the CD, loved it, and on November 29, 1999, the Swiss trio played their first concert at the LOFT – the beginning of a fruitful collaboration that lasted for years, as it led to more and more contacts with musicians from the Swiss scene, which was certainly also due to the fact that Nils Wogram, Gerry Hemingway, and many other musicians were now working in Switzerland. And if you want to become known in a scene, you have to have friends – so through our collaboration with Steamboat drummer and communications genius Lucas Niggli, the LOFT also became known in Switzerland....
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tickets:
regular: 14,- €uro
students, disabled persons: 7,- €uro
doors: 7.30 pm CEST
concert starts:
approx. 8.00 pm CEST
From: 05/2025 – In the beginning there was a Steamboat…
https://www.loftkoeln.de/en/05-2025-in-the-beginning-there-was-a-steamboat/
Back when people still wrote letters, sent demo CDs or faxes, or simply made phone calls, Marino Pliakas, a member of the trio Steamboat Switzerland, called me and asked if I had listened to the CD he had sent me. “Not yet, but Steamboat sounds more like Dixieland jazz to me, and the LOFT isn’t the right place for that,” was my reply. Anyone familiar with the music of Steamboat Switzerland will realize how wrong I was, so I listened to the CD, loved it, and on November 29, 1999, the Swiss trio played their first concert at the LOFT – the beginning of a fruitful collaboration that lasted for years, as it led to more and more contacts with musicians from the Swiss scene, which was certainly also due to the fact that Nils Wogram, Gerry Hemingway, and many other musicians were now working in Switzerland. And if you want to become known in a scene, you have to have friends – so through our collaboration with Steamboat drummer and communications genius Lucas Niggli, the LOFT also became known in Switzerland.
HM MĂĽller, 2025
The Steamboat Switzerland from Zurich storms, hisses, rumbles, hammers, groans, grooves – and lives! Still the most exciting and spectacular Central European band on the borderline between avant-garde and hardcore: energetic, innovative new music, presented in the best live performance!
Founded in 1995, the hardcore metal/new music/improvised rock band are still one of the wildest, freshest and most radical band projects around. Occupying a space between improvisation and composition, the music of this Hammond Avantcore Trio embraces many idioms. Its amazing sounds defy categorization. The trio has performed everywhere around the world from squats to a broad range of festivals including the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Lucerne Festival, Moers Festival, Patti Smith’s London Meltdown Festival, MaerzMusik Berlin etc.etc. Buried in improvised passages are composed modules by selected composers such as Felix Profos, Sam Hayden, Stephan Wittwer, or Michael Wertmüller. Pushing the boundaries of playability, Dominik Blum deconstructs the nostalgic sound of his Hammond organ, Marino Pliakas supplies powerful riffs on the e-bass, and Lucas Niggli glides through the fastest and trickiest poly-rhythms on the drums.
https://steamboatswitzerland.ch/de/
Highly condensed condensate, beautiful, complex walls of sound are brewed under high pressure and positioned at the cutting edge by negating the boundaries between the long-defunct opposites of E and U, composition and improvisation, and giving voice to current socio-cultural and musical phenomena in the encounter between avant-garde and underground sound.
As part of their proven concept of multi-idiomatic modules interacting with improvised textures, Steamboat Switzerland on stage offer a daily selection of instant composing and diverse material dedicated to the trio. The repertoire is decided in real time on stage.
Steamboat Switzerland—a powerful steamboat that takes its name from Adolf Wölfli’s “Dampfer Swizerland.” In Wölfli’s epic poem “Von der Wiege bis ins Graab” (From the Cradle to the Grave), the steamboat Swizerland travels down the Rhine; every country it passes through is destroyed, only the steamboat itself remains…
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