DIZ × TRAUNMUELLER — LIVE
A Site-Responsive Practice in Spontaneous Composition
Curatorial statement and booking information for museums, galleries, biennials, and festivals.
Listening as Encounter
Two musicians enter your institution. They look at the work. They begin to play. What follows is unrepeatable.
Renato Diz (keys) and Peter Traunmueller (drums) compose in real time, in direct response to the works on view. No score. No setlist. No second take. Each performance is a single, irreversible encounter — built from the architecture of the room, the curatorial logic of the exhibition, and the chemistry the duo has refined over years of shared practice.
This is not music staged near artworks. It is music made of them.
A Practice Rooted in Intermedia Inquiry
The duo's site-responsive performances extend a body of work that has occupied them for years. Their 2023 intermedia release Descriptions of Useless Subtitles and Meaningful Sublimations — six years in the making, with collaborators Pedro Marnoto (visual artist) and José Diogo Neves (engineer, multi–Estonian Music Awards laureate) — conceived the album as a "living ecosystem" of thirteen interdependent organisms, each pairing a real-time sonic event with a poem and a black-and-white visual composition. Every track was recorded live to tape on keyboard and drums alone: no overdubs, no edits, no post-production. The poems followed by automatic writing; the images by intuitive draftsmanship in dialogue with the sound.
That intermedia praxis — sound generating text generating image, all of it bound by a refusal to revise — is the methodology Diz and Traunmueller now bring into the gallery. The walls take the place of the page. The exhibition becomes the prompt.
The duo invites the viewer-listener to enter what they call a synesthetic bubble: a space where the question mark is treated as a creative companion, and where impermanence, plurality, and continuous mutation are the operating conditions rather than risks to be managed.
Radical Spontaneity & the Telepathic Duo
Everything is composed in the moment. Not "mostly." Not "with some prepared material." Everything.
The duo built their practice on a single, uncompromising rule: whatever happens, happens once, and we follow it together. There are no rehearsed motifs, no agreed-upon structures, no contingencies. The same ethos that produced their studio recordings — captured in unbroken real time, with no overdubs or post-production artifice — governs every live encounter.
What allows this to function as composition rather than chaos is the chemistry between them. Diz and Traunmueller have spent years cultivating what they describe as a telepathic musical connection: a shared listening so attuned that ideas are caught, abandoned, and transformed mid-phrase by mutual instinct. They finish each other's musical sentences. They pivot in unison without signal. They listen the way close friends argue — fast, generous, fearless.
The result is a form of authorship that lives only in the duration of the performance itself. You are not watching two players take turns. You are watching one mind think across two pairs of hands, in active dialogue with the room around them.
The Artists
Renato Diz is a Portuguese transdisciplinary auteur based in New York and Miami. He holds a Doctorate in Musical Arts from the University of Miami, a Master's from NYU, and a Bachelor's from ESMAE–P.Porto, with formative studies under Mário Laginha and Carlos Azevedo. His project I Will Play Your Soul was selected from 26,000 international submissions for the IdeasCity Festival at the New Museum, New York. He has performed and recorded with Roy Hargrove, Miguel Zenón, Maria Schneider, Melissa Aldana, Ari Hoenig, Randy Brecker, Ralph Alessi, and many others, and is the founder of the New York label W&J Productions.
Peter Traunmueller is an Austrian drummer, pianist, composer, and arranger based in New York City. Trained at Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität in Linz, he has performed at Blue Note, Birdland, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Smalls, with festival appearances across the United States, Austria, Spain, Greece, Peru, Canada, and China. His compositional work has been programmed by the New York Composer's Circle.
Formats for Curators
Each engagement is developed in conversation with curatorial and programming teams. Sets typically run 45–75 minutes and can be configured as:
A single continuous performance sited in one gallery, conceived as a sustained response to a specific exhibition or work
A roaming, processional performance moving through multiple rooms, with the audience traveling alongside the duo as the music shifts in response to each space
A series of discrete responses to individual works selected in advance with curators — a structure especially suited to permanent collections, retrospectives, and biennials
Audiences are encouraged to move freely. Standing, sitting, leaving, and returning are all welcomed. The work is built to accommodate both contemplative attention and ambient presence.
Booking
Diz and Traunmueller perform internationally at museums, biennials, art fairs, galleries, and festivals committed to genuinely site-responsive programming. Each engagement begins with a curatorial conversation — about the exhibition, the audience, and the kind of encounter the institution wishes to host.
The rest is composed in the room, with the room.
Once. Without revision.