RENATO DIZ ✕ PETER TRAUNMUELLER is a live, site-responsive practice in spontaneous composition — a multi-sensorial experience conceived for exhibitions, installations, screenings, and arts spaces and events, in which the works on view — or on screen — become a core catalyst. Renato Diz (keys) and Peter Traunmueller (drums) compose in real time, in direct dialogue with the venue that hosts them. With no prepared setlist, each performance is an inevitable biome born from the architecture of the room(s), its curatorial or cinematic logic, and the near-telepathic chemistry the duo has perfected over nearly a decade of shared practice. Conceived in intimate collaboration with each setting, every presentation refuses the safety nets that mediate so much contemporary performing arts.
Renato Diz is an award-winning Portuguese transdisciplinary artist, producer, and educator based in New York City. He has recorded more than thirty albums as leader, co-leader, and sideperson, ten of them currently in post-production, and has performed onstage and on record with Randy Brecker, Maria Schneider, Anat Cohen, Patti Austin, Brian Lynch, Steve Turre, and Ari Hoenig, in rooms including the Library of Congress, SummerStage, Symphony Space, Casa da Música, and the Kinshasa Jazz Festival. His work has earned two DownBeat Student Music Awards, as performer and mentor; a Society of Illustrators Gold Medal for the animated short Tuttodunpezzo; and Best Artistic Project at both the Serralves and Plataforma.UMA International Festivals. A Henry Mancini Fellow, he holds a doctorate summa cum laude from the University of Miami, where his research on prepared piano techniques in transidiomatic improvisation led to the publication Epistrophy, published in 2027. He founded W&J Productions in 2014.
Peter Traunmueller is an Austrian drummer, pianist, composer, arranger, and educator based in New York City. Trained in classical percussion in his native Salzburg and steeped at home in American jazz, rock, and fusion, he earned a BA in music performance from Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität in Linz. He spent several years immersed in Vienna's jazz scene before settling in New York in 2012. From there, his drumming has reached festival stages in the US, China, Spain, Greece, Peru, and Canada, and NYC rooms including Blue Note, Birdland, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. As a drummer, he has toured with Milo Z, opening for The Family Stone and Prince's New Power Generation; as a pianist, he performed with Greg Errico and Days of Wild alongside Vanilla Fudge and Jefferson Starship. His curiosity reaches past sound alone: he contributed to the score of "NYC – This Is Us," a documentary commissioned by the Austrian Cultural Forum NYC, and presented his “Piece for String Quartet” at The New York Composer’s Circle year-round concert series.
MULTIDISCIPLINARY RELEASE
DESCRIPTIONS OF USELESS SUBTITLES AND MEANINGFUL SUBLIMATIONS is a multi-dimensional living ecosystem with 13 interdependent organisms: a musical soundscape, a poem, and a visual artwork, fused into an interactive world of endless interpretation. The project crystallizes the telepathic bond between Renato Diz and Peter Traunmueller, recorded live on keyboard and drums exclusively — no retakes, no overdubs, no post-production. José Diogo Neves oversaw the recording, mixing, and mastering of every session. His audiophile mixes unearthed unexpected poetic and cinematic depth, to which Renato and Peter answered with automatic-writing poems, meticulously edited together over pandemic-era videoconferences. The sound-and-word mixture conjured new visual worlds, drawing in Pedro Marnoto, who sketched amid the music and poetry before joining Renato to shape intricate compositions. Six years in the making, this ecosystem balances spontaneity and precision, culminating in a synesthetic bubble of life where the question mark stands as a reminder of impermanence, plurality, and constant mutation.
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