gustavo obligado

On June 27, 2026, I was invited to play in the Small Forms series, organized by Alisa Beck and Gustavo Petek in Vienna. My first performance in Austria after six years living in Europe, based in
Berlin. A recording session was scheduled that day at Château Rouge, before the evening concert, on what turned out to be one of the hottest days Europe saw that year: heat alerts on every phone, red warnings, public transport discouraged.

The space worked like its own microclimate. Conditions inside were completely different from those outside, letting us work while the heat dictated every movement in the city. That contrast made me think about what we can’t control. Weather is one of the clearest forms of that loss of control: we can anticipate it, measure it, receive alerts, but not decide over it and that day it
determined where we could be and how our own bodies could function. The same tension runs through the way I play. I used a curved soprano saxophone more than a hundred years old, whose
sound depends on breath, body, temperature, and the instrument’s response, none of it stable. I added an effects pedal and an “error machine” I built with my friend Tom Kessler it doesn’t generate pure randomness, it reacts to what I play, introducing deviations outside my control.

Improvisation is a way of relating to that uncertainty: deciding constantly, but also responding to what wasn’t decided. Sound emerges between intention and accident, between control and its
loss. Without seeking it, the heat and the instruments became the music’s starting point. 

www.gustavo-obligado.com