D/B RECOMMENDED: YOU ARE HERE AKA THE MAZE FESTIVAL @ WEST GERMANY BERLIN | SATURDAY, 15.09. – 29.09.2012

The YOU ARE HERE festival – a giant installation that alters a space in it’s architecture by chopping it up, diverting, chanelling, corridoring, barricading it like a labyrinth. It is a labyrinth! Built into Westgermany, weird materials, transparent and nontransparent. Inside tons of stuff like art, performance, most of all music – curated by artists and promoters based in Berlin. (...)

D/B 09/25/12

Update: You Are Here AKA The Maze festival

Because the organisers of the Maze festival at West Germany are the coolest people, we have been able to get a quick update from them on how the first days of the two-week-event have been going. It is such an exciting project, which we wholeheartedly support, so go on over and have a look. Here is what organiser Grinni had to say on the initial days: "First days of the MAZE were as diverse at it can get! People self-directing their way through a labyrinth of woven strings and sonic experiments: (...)

The Craze 09/20/12

a maze-ing

When was the last time you let yourself become really and truly lost—physically or emotionally? When was the last time you basked unabashedly in feelings of uncertainty and doubt and utter disorientation without resorting to consulting a map or an app, a self-help book, or an internet forum filled with people ready to spoon-feed you solutions and anecdotal theories? (...)

Sugar High 09/17/12

THE EXTENDED AMORPHOUS DRONE FOR MULTIPLE HEADS CURATED BY AIDAN BAKER @ WEST GERMANY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

This was one of the most enjoyable shows from the whole year, not least because at least four or five of the performers told me about these little eureka moments they had during the course of the night when they stopped somewhere in the middle of the maze and realised that the initial plan, which had sounded perhaps somewhat dubious to some of us on paper actually worked really well. My thanks to the other performers, and especially Aidan for the night. (...)

SELEKTIVES HÖREN ARCHIV

You Are Here Fest: ZS / Patrick Higgins / Ann Liv Young

Came back to a clogged Maze entrance, and Zs were just grinding up. Talk about a group that knows exactly how each member plays: Watching them is one of those “That’s real real nice” moments, I suppose. The way they go about constructing songs and playing off each other works well in any live venue. Specifically: performance. It’s not something you can nod to; maybe for a second, but not consistently. Just stare and observe and enjoy. You know, it’s fucking-jazz. Maybe that’s not a genre, but if (modern) jazz got to fucking, it’d be ZS. Less in a sexual way and way-way in a “witness-this” way. As performance as performance can get. Maybe-maybe-maybe. At any rate, I got back to may car and it was a Thursday, so I had work early the next morning. (...)

Tiny Mix Tapes 07/13/12

The You Are Here Festival (aka the maze)

“Trouble, the art duo (composed of Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris), bring their performance/interactive art maze to Bushwick for four weeks this summer. Forging through barriers both physical and mental, the maze attempts to dissolve audience/performer dichotomy while funneling visitors through a maze of installations, experimental music, and performance art. Check out Trouble's website for the hefty roster of participating artists and a digital simulation of the maze. ” (...)

Flavorpill

You Are Here

There are two kinds of avant-garde sound makers: those who view their work as Serious Art, best experienced under monastic conditions, and those who refuse to accept the idea that experimental music can’t be a party. If you side with the latter camp, you need to have Sam Hillmer on cultural speed dial. Since the late ’90s, the local saxophonist has been on a multifaceted mission to fuse classical music’s intellectual rigor with underground rock’s street-level rawness. The various series he’s helped oversee—including Practice!, currently going down weekly at Williamsburg’s Zebulon—have snowballed into a polyglot scene, embracing indie hip-hop, modern composition, free jazz, outlandish theater and more. (...)

Time Out New York 07/09/12

You Are Here Festival (Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris of Trouble + Patrick Higgins): Interview

“Since there’s no front or back row, it’s an experience without a center and without an exterior.” (...)

Tiny Mix Tapes

Title of article

Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris' You Are Here art maze hits a measured sense of eerie whimsy, sort of like being in one of the sets from the Labyrinth. The maze continues to evolve every night as new sculptures appear and new sight lines open up. (...)

Impose 09/09

Mick Barr added to Sam Hillmer's Death By Audio maze

Saxophonist, composer, teacher and all around swell-dressing guy Sam Hillmer has conceived a maze to engulf all of a rock venue for a month. Entitled You Are Here, the month-long installation by Trouble—his collaboration with artist Laura Paris—is a performance festival in an actual maze taking place from September 10 - October 2, 2009 in Williamsburg's Death by Audio. (...)

Impose 07/24/09

The Maze

There are dozens of concerts, exhibitions and performances in Williamsburg each week. But starting today through Oct. 2, the club Death by Audio will host something completely different — an interactive space designed to challenge the predetermined roles of both audience member and performer. (...)

Brooklyn Based 09/10/09

You are here: A Maze...

Musician and educator extraordinaire Sam Hillmer is at it again. While not performing and making music with his band Zs, or working with Brooklyn youth to create music and art for Representing NYC, he is hard at work as Trouble, with partner Laura Paris, creating installations and all-around weird shit. On display from September 10 thru Oct. 2 at Death by Audio in Williamsburg is You Are Here, aka The Maze. (...)

Microphone Memory Emotion 07/28/09

12 Bands, 12 Hours

How do you get a dozen bands to assemble for your benefit? Well, if you’re Sam Hillmer, you just ask.

“I called in a lot of favors,” said Hillmer, who co-organized the 12-hour benefit at the DIY music venue Death by Audio last Saturday, said. The marathon concert was thrown to raise funds for You Are Here: The Maze, a sculptural maze and performance festival that’s coordinated by Hillmer and sculptor Laura Paris. “A lot of people have fond memories of [You Are Here]. People wanted to see it happen.” (...)

The Greenpoint Gazette 07/30/09

You Are Here (aka THE MAZE)

Art never sleeps. It evolves and breeds taking on many different shapes and forms at different intervals. Art... Is all in the eyes of the beholder and is nothing more than what you make, or take, out of it. The relationship between art and music is ever present in our society. It should come as no surprise that promoter/musician Sam Hillmer and wife/sculptor Laura wanted to combine the two into something that pushes the boundaries of todays jaded society. (...)

The Deli 09/08/09

Trouble and the B-Keepers You Are Here: A Maze

At Chashama’s 44th Street gallery, the collaborative team Trouble and the B-Keepers (Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris) invited over 50 performance groups, noise musicians and DJ’s to perform throughout the month of May. Each day, three or four of these acts would simultaneously bombard the audiences with noise, participatory engagements and music from inside a maze—a tight network of folding walls that helped spark a consciousness of installation and performance as inherently variable activities. An historical imperative of the avant-garde has been the strategy of breaking down preconceived notions of audience space and performer space, but Trouble and the B-Keepers’ variation on this tradition of game play heterogeneously distorts art-viewing roles without necessitating antagonism between them. Similarly, by handpicking performers from different creative communities to activate the space, they initiated a creative potlatch that emphasized the shared concerns among them. (...)

The Brooklyn Rail 05/18/07