Alexandre Babel

Alexandre Babel

Drummer, percussionist and composer, Alexandre Babel is involved in various contemporary contexts such as modern classical music, free improvisation and multimedia performances. He performs worldwide as a soloist and ensemble musician in some of the leading venues and festivals of new music. Babel is the artistic director of the Swiss percussion group Eklekto and a founding member of the performance collective Radial.

As a percussionist, composer and curator, Alexandre Babel stretches the boundaries of New Music. Born in Geneva in 1980, he studied in his hometown and in New York City. Today he is considered a reference in the interpretation of the 20th and 21st century repertoire, and in the experimental music scene. His innovative projects break through the boundaries of musical convention, confounding listener expectations in the conquest of new contexts. Alexandre Babel is a founding member of the performance collective Radial and the duo White Zero Corp. He also plays solo percussion for the chamber music ensemble Neue Musik Berlin. He has been the artistic director of the contemporary percussion collective Eklekto since 2013 and has worked with a great many bands and artists, among which Joke Lanz’s noise nock band Sudden Infant. His compositions have been performed at renowned contemporary music festivals, including the Festival Archipel in Geneva, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, and the 2020 Festival Les Amplitudes in La Chaux-de-Fonds. He passes on his extensive knowledge lecturing at the Berlin University of the Arts, the Conservatoire de musique de Genève and Melbourne University in particular.