Photo: © Pavlo Kochan, 2025
About
Ulrich Müller has an international reputation as an electronic musician and composer. He was taught classical guitar from an early age and began experimenting with sound using tape and guitar effects already as a teenager. His musical career took off in the early 1980s when he became a session and tour guitarist. Soon he was able to afford his first synthesizers, with which he continued his sound experiments inspired by his enthusiasm for early electronic music of the 1950s.
During this time, he began studying musicology, met composer Stephan Wunderlich, with whom he founded the Association for Experimental Music, and took composition lessons from Klaus K. Hübler. Between 1984 and 1988, he attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, where he met Clarence Barlow, with whom he became friends and to whom he owes his first steps in the field of computer music.
His encounter with Josef Anton Riedl in 1987 (former artistic director of the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music) was groundbreaking for him. Ulrich Müller became part of Riedl's ensemble and was responsible for sound direction in numerous electronic music performances. Riedl became an influential teacher, mentor and fatherly friend for him.
Between 1987 and 1991, Ulrich Müller collaborated with sculptor and painter Ovis Wende to create a series of multimedia works, which included also the use of data obtained from the Internet for real-time control of sound and movement. For their work, they received the Karl Hofer Prize from the Berlin University of the Arts (HdK, now UdK).
Ulrich Müller taught at the Berlin University of the Arts and in the media lab of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, among other places. In 1991 he began also working as a freelance author. Since then, he has written numerous radio features on classical and new music. In 1995 he was Guest Artist at the ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
In 1998, he founded the group 48nord together with his former fellow student Siegfried Rössert. Originally founded as a trio, 48nord soon became known as a duo consisting of Siegfried Rössert and Ulrich Müller. 48nord´s musical focus consists of a combination of composition and improvisation, as well as the interaction of acoustic and electronic instruments. 48nord has performed at numerous international festivals, received commissions, including for the Biennale für Neues Musiktheater in Munich, and composed and produced a series of radiophonic pieces (especially for Deutschlandfunk Kultur). 48nord received a number of grants for their work. In the early 2000s they met New York-based composer and trombonist George Lewis, with whom they performed at the Sounds Like Now Festival in New York, among other venues, and who invited them to join his project “Sequel” for the SWR New Jazz Meeting in 2004. Besides George Lewis, 48nord has also collaborated with a number of other musicians from the field of improvised music, such as Charlotte Hug, Sebi Tramontana, and Lou Mallozzi.
In 2006, they were invited by the Bavarian State Ballet to collaborate with internationally renowned choreographer Jacopo Godani, and since then, this collaboration has resulted in a large number of ballet-pieces for Jacopo Godani, including for the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen, the Semperoper Ballet in Dresden, the Biennale Danza in Venice, the Sydney Dance Company, the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company, and many more. In addition to Jacopo Godani, 48nord has worked with choreographers Tim Harbour, Simone Sandroni, Moritz Ostruschnjak, Xin Peng Wang, and Tarek Assam. Composer, drummer, and electronic musician Patrick Schimanski also contributed to the music for Tarek Assam's choreography. Schimanski joined 48nord as its third member in 2013 and has continued 48nord as a duo with Ulrich Müller since the death of Siegfried Rössert in 2020.
About two years after Siegfried Rössert passed away and a period of reorientation, Ulrich Müller again began composing and performing electronic solo pieces. In 2023, electronic musician and "Crusher-X" developer Jörg Stelkens, with whom Ulrich Müller had already collaborated between 2000 and 2010 as curators of the t-u-b-e soundart gallery in Munich, invited him to join the duo project “tranai”, whose musical focus is drone music. Jörg Stelkens and Ulrich Müller have already performed at several festivals with “tranai” such as the Liquid Sky Festival in Lisbon, and have released a number of albums (see also: www.tranai.de). Under the name MOW, Ulrich Müller is also working since 2024 with his long-time musical companion, drummer Wolfram Winkel and saxophonist Wolfgang Opitz. MOW is a fusion project in which the three musicians combine elements of industrial music, art rock, and fusion jazz and pursue their passion for groove music. Their first album is currently still in production and is expected to be released in 2026.
Ulrich Müller is currently working on ballet music for a choreography by Tim Harbour for the West Australian Ballet in Perth and is preparing a new electronic solo project entitled NOIR-O12.