Swiss drummer-percussionist-composer Michael Wertmüller has worked as a percussionist in the Bern Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam and as a drummer in high-octane free improving bands like Peter Brötzmann’s Full Blast, or Brötzmann’s son, Caspar Brötzmann’s Massaker, and collaborated with John Cale, Bill Laswell, Blixa Bargeld, Jim O’Rourke, and Mouse on Mars. He always defied any attempt to categorize and classify his music and likes to see it as a utopian process that turns many small rooms into one huge space that evades mental and physical limitations.
Shlimazl (in Yiddish messy, or a very unlucky or inept person who fails at everything) is Wertmüller’s composition for the Basel Sinfonietta and the
