About
Guilherme Rodrigues
Guilherme Rodrigues is a Portuguese cellist, improviser, curator, pedagogue, and artistic researcher based in Berlin. His work moves between contemporary music, free improvisation, electroacoustic practice, interdisciplinary performance, and artistic research, with a particular focus on sound, listening, space, and the expanded possibilities of the cello.
With a background in classical and contemporary music, he has developed over the years a distinctive artistic language shaped by instrumental precision, textural sensitivity, extended techniques, and an exploratory approach to form. His practice unfolds in solo settings, ensemble work, and interdisciplinary collaborations, often in dialogue with acoustic architecture, site-specificity, movement, theatre, and collective creation.
He is the founder of the Red List Ensemble and co-founder of the projects dis/con/sent, Conundrum and Hunter Underwater, and also performs with formations such as the Berlin Improvisers Orchestra and the Reanimation Orchestra. Alongside an ongoing international performance activity, he has collaborated with musicians, composers, performers, and dancers from different generations and geographies, including Franziska Schroeder, Aki Takase, Raymond McDonald, Ernesto Rodrigues, Axel Dörner, Tristan Honsinger, Elo Masing, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Radu Malfatti, Nuno Torres, Yuko Kaseki and Gio JU.
His artistic activity also includes research-based projects. The solo album Acoustic Reverb (Creative Sources, 2022), supported by Musikfonds, documents an extended sonic investigation into the acoustics of churches in Berlin. The project Extended Techniques of the Cello, supported by a GVL grant, brings together artistic research, documentation, and transmission, and has become a relevant resource for performers and composers interested in contemporary string practice. He also received support from the Deutsche Orchester-Stiftung for the interdisciplinary project Vergangenes Neu Interpretieren.
As a curator, he has directed CreativeFest in Lisbon and Berlin, and the weekly series Improvised & Experimental at Hošek Contemporary in Berlin since 2018, actively contributing to the consolidation of a platform dedicated to experimental, improvised, and interdisciplinary practices. His work has received critical attention in publications such as The Wire, Salt Peanuts, Jazz.pt, Touching Extremes, Squidco, Avant Music News, and Orynx, and has been broadcast by platforms including BBC Radio 3, Ö1/ORF, WFMU, Cashmere Radio, and RTP Antena 1.
Across more than 250 recordings, a wide network of artistic collaborations, and many years of work as a performer, curator, and teacher, Guilherme Rodrigues has built a singular path within contemporary improvised, experimental, and interdisciplinary music - one guided by attention, risk, listening, and a persistent desire to expand the ways music can be made, heard, and thought.