"Klaus Janek (born November 26, 1969 in Bozen, Italy) is an Italian double bass player of improvised music and composer of experimental electronic music. He lives in Berlin.

Janek first learned to play the flute and then to play the trumpet. Since 1988 he turned to the classical double bass, which he studied with Mauro Muraro. He attended master classes and workshops with Dave Holland, Peter Kowald, Butch Morris and Jaribu Shahid. He plays the acoustic double bass as well as the electronically processed double bass.

He has performed with Kowald's local ensemble and at the Vision Festival with an ensemble led by Bill Dixon. Since 1994 he has also given solo concerts; after his first solo album Caspar² (2001) he presented another solo album Caspar² in 2004. Further albums were created for edel classics, minor music, Solponticello and Ubiquity.

His sound research and work as a soloist, in various formations and for dance and theater productions is recognized and appreciated internationally. For the piece Apud of Thierry Niang Company, Marseille, he composed the suite Lettera Amorosa (2002-03). With Claudio Rocchetti he was on tour to Southeast Asia (album Hong Kong Pavilion ). He improvised with musicians such as Borah Bergman, Toshinori Kondō, Johannes and Conny Bauer, Joe and Mat Maneri, Wolfgang Fuchs, Michael Zerang,Klaus Kürvers, Florian Bramböck, Christoph Irmer, Agustí Fernández, Andreas Paolo Perger, Roger Turner, LaDonna Smith or Wilbert de Joode. He also performed with the 17 hippies.

He also works as a sound designer for architecture and media ( arte, ZDF and 3sat ); he also composed film scores for documentaries. He was married to the dancer and choreographer Britta Pudelko."

"Yan Jun was born in 1973 and he grew up in Lanzhou in the province Gansu, where during his teenage years he started writing poetry. He has lived in Beijing since 1999 where he has worked as a music critic, focusing mainly on Chinese underground rock. He founded the record label Sub Jam in 2000, which has since produced a lot of alternative Chinese music. He started making his own music in 2004. Whilst this may be seen as relatively late, his music making can be considered just one of several strings to Yan Jun's bow, along with performance, poetry, writing and curating.

Yan Jun's aesthetic is like a reflection of this borderless, non-hierarchical musical melting pot where everything seems possible. His main sounding materials are field recordings and noise. Esthetically he is interested in sound characteristics such as high frequencies, noise and silence. He plays live, as a soloist or with other musicians and uses lo-tech apparatus, often in improvisation and thus plays a part in the international 'improv' scene. As a composer and musician, he also explores the sonic consequences of body movements, works with video, makes sound installations and writes his own texts for his media works. It comes as no surprise that he has been presented to the Shanghai Biennale, has received a honorarium mention at Prix Ars Electronica and has been invited to the Berlin and Rotterdam international poetry festivals.

With and through different media, Yan Jun is exploring the poetic side of the everyday and of basic materials, exemplified in a few of his works from the last years. Recently, for "Living Room Tour," in Beijing 2014, he visited several private living rooms and from this made a collage of audio and video recordings. The live work "Gestures (Two)" depicts a scene which revolves around a slowly moving and silent figure who is captured in his movements by swarming photographers. In this rather still and quiet performance, the sound of the camera shutters and the flashes give a minimalist commentary on the implication of performing, listening and documentation.

In "Let's act", which was conducted in 2014 in Rotterdam, Yan Jun elegantly links the various cultural activities his oeuvre presents. A text written by Yan Jun about noise and the instrumentalization of noise is juxtaposed with field-recordings and video shots from everyday life. Here noise, rather than being composed, is drawn from a variety of essential parts of life such as communication and social gathering. The work thus artistically displays some of the main features of Yan Jun's music and art. Although he uses a broad range of techniques, he maintains a strong focus and concentration on the everyday and on the importance of the visual as well as an auditive reality."-Andreas Engström