The composer, percussionist and instrument builder Limpe Fuchs has spent six decades exploring the outer limits of sound and its effects on the listener. Born in Munich in 1941, Fuchs is part of a generation of German artists who sought radical new approaches to art, music and social organisation in the period following the Second World War. She formed the group Anima-Sound with sculptor Paul Fuchs in the late 1960s, when the couple moved to Peterskirchen, a Bavarian village that attracted a thriving artistic community in the 1960s and 70s. The duo’s improvised performances featured self-made instruments, including a ‘pendulum string’ based on a Pythagorean monochord and versions of traditional instruments such as zithers.

After Anima-Sound disbanded in the 1980s, Fuchs continued exploring sonic materials, designing large-scale instruments from stone and metal that are the centrepiece of her current performances. However, her solo albums, including a number of releases on Christoph Heemann’s Streamline label, are just as likely to feature vocals, violin, viola, piano, field recordings and electronics.

Fuchs celebrates her 80th birthday this month with a concert at Berlin’s Zwinglikirch. Other artists on the bill include Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, Fuchs’s son Zoro Babel, and Ignaz Schick, Ruth-Maria Adam and Ronnie Oliveras, with whom Fuchs plays in the improvising group Bunte Truppe.

Anima-Sound
“It Loves – Want To’ve Done It/Crazy Crying”
From Stürmischer Himmel (Ohr/Play Loud!) 1970/2015

Anima-Sound’s debut album contains some of Limpe and Paul Fuchs’s earliest experiments with new instruments and spontaneous music making, featuring Paul’s homemade bass and zither as well as the ubiquitous Fuchshorn – a large, curled copper horn with a mournful tone. It’s also a snapshot of the daily creative activities of Anima, where music happened alongside farming, gardening, sculpting and more. Maybe there’s a song in here somewhere, hinted at in the track’s title and Limpe’s vocal, but it’s been pulled apart and scrambled and thrown back together as yells and ululations, with a backing of detuned, sliding bass, rattling drums and stormy cymbals.

Anima-Sound
“Traktor Go Go Go”
From Musik für Alle (Alter Pfarrhof/Play Loud!) 1971/2015

In 1971 Limpe and Paul Fuchs and their two young children set off on a tour of Germany, Austria and the Netherlands towing a wooden caravan – that doubled up as a stage – behind a tractor. The duo performed in town squares, fields and factory car-parks, and stopped off in Düsseldorf to record a session with producer Willi Neubauer, resulting in one of Anima’s most readably kosmische albums on which two longform improvisations are heavily processed. Surrender to the omnipresent ring modulation and Musik Für Alle is an utter trip, an uncanny tour diary of the imagination. The TV documentary Mit 20 km/h Durch Europa (available to stream from Play Loud!), which shows the tractor-caravan trundling along country roads and highways, emphasises the eccentricity of Anima’s endeavour but also features compelling live footage, including a set with pianist Friedrich Gulda on the fringes of the staid Salzburg Festival.

Anima-Sound
“Duo 4”
From Im Lungau (Play Loud!) 2020

This set from Gulda and singer Ursula Anders’s Tage Freier Musik festival was recorded in 1977 but released for the first time last year. It’s hard to pick an excerpt from an improvised performance, but the spacious “Duo 4” highlights the Limpe and Paul Fuchs’s powers of communication in a sparse dialogue between horn and percussion that puts me in mind of Peter Brötzmann and Hann Bennink’s contemporaneous Schwarzwaldfahrt – or maybe that’s just the mountain air. Limpe’s playing is especially nimble here, a warm-up for the snare-heavy ten minute percusion solo that follows “Duo 4”.

Limpe Fuchs
“Violin Goes Forest”
From Muusiccia (Metal/Stones) (Streamline/Play Loud!) 1993/2015

Fuchs has created music for theatre and radio dramas and, like much of this album, “Violin Goes Forest” has the feel of a scene from a dimly remembered story from long ago, as Fuchs’s spiralling violin line cuts through the shimmering soundfield of resonant tones and overtones produced by the ballast strings. Fuchs reluctantly learned to play the violin while studying to be a music teacher, but went on to develop her own insistent, uncompromising yet often rather conversational voice on the instrument, drawing out its earthy textures and percussive potential.

Limpe Fuchs
“Mus”
From Nur Mar Mus (Streamline/Play Loud!) 1999/2015

The ‘25 serpentinit stones’ mentioned on the sleevenotes of Nur Mar Mus are the building blocks of Fuchs’s lithophone, a large tuned percussion instrument whose bars are made from serpentinite rocks from the Lombardy region of Italy. The flat grey-green slabs of stone both look and sound otherworldly, producing rippling almost-melodies and clashing beat frequencies. On “Mar”, Fuchs adds her voice to the mix, singing wordless phrases and long tones and occasionally breaking into a shout, both disrupting and meshing with the complex patterns she draws from the stones.

Limpe Fuchs
“Berlin 1”
From Pianobody 2002 (Seven Legged Spiders & Co/Play Loud!) 2006/2015

Pianobody sees Fuchs exploring keyboard instruments including a decrepit grand piano, harmonium, and, on the two “Berlin” tracks, a harpsichord belonging to her friend, the performance artist Margaret Raspé, with whom Fuchs was staying when she recorded these understated improvisations. There are traces of Alice Coltrane in the meditative performance (it helps that the harpsichord sounds a bit like a harp), while Fuchs’s enjoyment of the instrument’s material qualities can be heard in the way she repeatedly sounds the clunkier, looser keys rather than avoiding them, hearing sonic possibilities, not faults.

Bunte Truppe
“Umbra Gebrannt”
From Träumen Ohne Dinge (Play Loud! 2019)

Fuchs joins turntablist Ignaz Schick and multi-instrumentalists Ruth-Maria Adam and Ronnie Oliveras for an album of improvisations named after paint colours, with the opening track referencing burnt umber. Whether there’s a synaesthetic logic to these paintbox titles or they just made for a good organising principle for the album, Adam’s steely, skittering violin, Fuchs’s metallic percussion and assorted fizzling electronics give “Umbra Gebrannt” a dark, ferrous tinge. Fuchs provides the track’s subtle but distinct pulse as the group’s diverse sounds unravel around her.

Wire subscribers can read Frances Morgan’s interview with Limpe Fuchs from November 2020 in The Wire 441 via the online archive.