Carlos Cipa

Carlos Cipa is a composer, pianist, and above all curious listener who has built bridges between different musical worlds. Having received classical training as a young child, in his teenage years he swapped the piano stool for a seat behind the drum kit. When he returned to his main instrument and started releasing his first solo albums, his compositional approach as well as his unique playing were marked by the impressions that his musical detours through the worlds of rock, pop, jazz, and electronic music had left on him.

When Cipa started studying contemporary classical composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in his home town Munich in 2014, he was already collaborating with a slew of different artists while also writing music for film, TV, dance, and theatre. After he used the entire studio as an instrument on his electro-acoustic 2019 album “Retronyms” and co-founded the genre-agnostic band Runden together with drummer Simon Popp and multi-instrumentalist Martin Brugger on bass, Cipa started focussing on his main instrument again; or rather instruments, plural. 

As a composer-performer, Cipa firmly integrates the different qualities of various pianos into his practice. For “Correlations (on 11 pianos)” (2020) and  “Ourselves, as we are” (2023), as well as his interpretation of Hans Otte’s genre-defying “The Book of Sounds” (2024), he worked with different instruments to write or perform his pieces in ways that were inspired by their acoustic characteristics. Cipa’s use of pianos from various eras continuously expands his compositional possibilities, and, much like his varied musical interests, have been crucial to the development of his distinct style as a composer and performer.

Cipa has undergone several transformations in his artistic life, but his creative driving force has remained the same: boundless curiosity. Whether he travels through different musical regions or productively explores the unique qualities of instruments such as his Steinway piano or the curious Yamaha CP-70: To hear Cipa’s music is to listen to an artist looking for the previously unheard-of between the notes that he plays, the acoustic idiosyncrasies of his instruments, and his environment.