Andreas Schaerer captures the flies buzzing around other people’s heads and sets them to music. He is generally acknowledged as the human incarnation of a vaudeville theater. From the dressers to the stagehands, from the wigmakers to the props department, the spotlight operator to the conductor, everything arises in his mind and comes out of his throat. Born in Emmental in 1976, he hasn’t closed his mouth since.
voice
Andreas Tschopp is actually a bird dressed up like a trombone. The outbreak of jaywalking in Zurich in the early eighties has been attributed to his birth there some years before. Only people with crooked toes are able to resist his charm. He is Hildegard’s sunny South Pole, stays calm during rush hour, and snores to the tune of Ornithology.
trombone, tuba
Benedikt Reising was born in 1978 in Basel. He has spent most of the intervening years collecting shiny metal tubing and blowing into it. With a smile in the corner of his eye and a foxtrot in his pocket, he plays the baritone sax as if it were his own private cocktail party.
baritone-, alto-saxophone, basse clarinet
Christoph Steiner keeps himself busy as a producer and by playing drums, typewriters, kitchen utensils, and whatever else he gets his hands on which isn’t bolted down. His industriousness is legendary and has lead listeners at Hildegard concerts to wonder if he isn’t simultaneously running a mail-order hardware business. Legend also has it that even consumptive mice can get their groove on to his beats. He first saw the light of day in 1980 in autumnal Winterthur.
drums, percussion, marimba
Marco Müller doesn’t just play the bass. He and his instrument are conjoined — an archaic root vegetable, a woody knot that steams and pounds and grooves like the engine on Santa’s snowmobile. He was born in a manger in Fribourg in 1980 and ever since he has had a fondness for sleeping in hay.
upright bass
Matthias Wenger is a saxophonist and a perfect gentleman, with a devil perched on one shoulder and a muse on the other. His first appearance on the world’s stage was in 1979, and he seems to have spent his formative years fiddling. He is a human jukebox and Rumpelstiltskin beyond compare.
alto-, soprano-saxophone
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