Thomas Kling's text TIROLTYROL, created 1987-1990 in Dusseldorf, Innsbruck, Kitzbühel, Schruns and Cologne, was published in 1991 (in Thomas Kling "brennstabm", Suhrkamp). Their sound implementation by Jörg Ritzenhoff was carried out in the same year. Thomas Kling first spoke his text, which was then cut in the process of the sound implementation, and (with the aid of synthesizers, samplers) mounted as a computer animation. The sound recordings on this piece originated in Mittenwald. The composer tried to "adapt to and sound out and illuminate" the text as far as possible.
In his late masterpiece "Zangezi", written in Moscow in 1922, Khlebnikov tries to combine his esoteric theory of numbers and power relationships that determine the course of the world, with the themes of Götterdämmerung and the gospel.
Bernhard and Ferdinand, two dog experts have determined that a dog doesn't go "bow-wow" in Chinese, but "Wangwang". Bernhard and Ferdinand listen raptly to the mutts, as does Joe, a postman, who compensates the unbelievable monotony of his life with 15 different types of bark.In the search for fundamental clarification of the problem both dog experts demonstrate true inquiring minds. They storm the scientific institutions and demand exact information. All the stops are pulled in the high and low barking sector. The dialogues are interwoven with the signs and sounds of dog language. A number of hilarious musical structures of animal onomatopoeia are created.
Michael Vetter, born in 1943, makes music, pictures, texts, theatre - and all these closely interrelated. He is popular as a master of overtone singing, but he himself is even more interested in what he refers to as "transverbal language". This radio play is an example of this. The audible, reflected through the ear and the voice, plays together. Reflecting for Michael Vetter means: The whole complex apparatus of human understanding with all its possibilities of association directed towards the interplay between ear and voice. A wordless language such as is heard in this radio play is extremely ambiguous. Everyone will have heard another story at the end.
This new piece by Michael Vetter is a further development of his work on a "transverbal language". A wordless language that attempts to direct the whole apparatus of human understanding associatively towards the interplay between ear and voice. This freedom and extreme ambiguity results in every listener having heard another radio play at the end. In this new work, language islands swim on a "Goldgrund" (golden background) of overtone singing, which tells of the "wonders of the voiceless saints".
In the second part of "Hungarian Soundscapes", we introduce the composers Gyula Bánkövi and Janos Decsényi with their sound compositions. Gyula Bánkövi's tone poem "Die Stimme der Seele" (The Voice of the Soul) is based on the "funeral oration" and Gaspar Károli's translation of the Bible, which made the Holy Scriptures accessible to Hungarians in their native language for the first time. Janós Decsényi's symphony "Should I rather leave with the cranes?" combines original recordings from the "Hortobágy" puszta with Hungarian folk songs, violin melodies and a rhyming chronicle from the 16th century.Both compositions were produced by the Hungarian Radio "HEAR study".
"Thors Hammer" (Thor's Hammer) an edda sound fragment by Kai Grehn.The Edda is the quintessence of Old Norse poetry about the creation and destruction of the world according to the beliefs of the old Germanic faith. At the same time it is a heroic epic, proverbial wisdom, poem of customs, song of magic and vision. Kai Grehn seeks to rediscover mythical themes. Language, voice, rhythm and sound come together as a dense, almost magical experience. The play, initially conceived as dance theatre, premièred in the Waschhaus Potsdam in 1994
In the first part of the "Hungarian Soundscapes" the composers play back their impressions of the atmosphere of Hungarian landscapes: In his composition "Wasser, Täler, Glocken" (Water, Valleys, Bells), Miklós Sugár associates the lapping of Lake Balaton with the sounds of bells, folk songs and harp music. In his "Bildern vom Örség" (Pictures of Örség), Gyula Pintér traces the acoustic landscape of western Hungary, from the chirping of crickets to cloudbursts up to fragments of a conversation. The "Etüden auf Dampflokomotiven" (Studies of steam locomotives) by Laszlo Sáry explore the range of sounds surrounding the whistling and groaning of old steam locomotives.All of the compositions were produced by the Hungarian Radio HEAR studio.
"Der Duft der Frauen" (The Perfume of Women) is a sound study of the major migratory movements in civilizations and in nature. It correlates the mysterious cyclical movements of the waters of the Atlantic with the emigration of Europeans to America. Part Two is a kind of parody of the longing for "Elsewhere" and the new Part Three deals with crossing and respecting every sort of boundary. This third part was awarded the "EAR 97" at the end of 1997, the Hungarian Radio's Prize for acoustic art. And the entire three-part work received another award in January: Chantal Dumas won the "Palmarès", the most important French radio play prize, awarded annually in Arles, in the Acoustic Art category.
"La Parata is a psycho-acoustic composition of phrases and words from European politicians of the 20th century. The speeches are reassembled according to tonal and rhythmic aspects in the form of a march, disengaged from their original meaning, so that they transform themselves into a "danse macabre" – a dance of death.
August Walla lives in the "Haus der Künstler" (House of Artists) belonging to the Gugging state psychiatric clinic near Vienna. He is a world-famous representative of "art brut", art by the so-called "insane". But for him and his admirers, his mind extends far beyond the cosmos that is known to us: here he paints and describes the "Ewigkeitsendeland" (Eternity's end country), which begins at the end of eternity, but is now already connected to our universe through "worm holes" (as modern theoretical physics refers to it)...
"Der Duft der Frauen" (The Perfume of Women) is a sound study of the major migratory movements in civilizations and in nature. It correlates the mysterious cyclical movements of the waters of the Atlantic with the emigration of Europeans to America. Part Two is a kind of parody of the longing for "Elsewhere" and the new Part Three deals with crossing and respecting every sort of boundary. This third part was awarded the "EAR 97" at the end of 1997, the Hungarian Radio's Prize for acoustic art. And the entire three-part work received another award in January: Chantal Dumas won the "Palmarès", the most important French radio play prize, awarded annually in Arles, in the Acoustic Art category.
In 1998, international celebrations are held for the 50th birthday of musique concrète, which was "born" in 1948 at French radio's Studio d'Essai."The Ulysses Project" is a homage to the creators of acoustic art. Through the adaptation of the Ulysses theme, the radio play becomes a reflection on the art of sound. A composition is created, which is divided into an endless number of short sequences. Each of these sequences follows up a particular kind of sound formation and the type of perception associated with it.
3500 European original sound recordings from 1900 to today make up part 1 of the two-hour radio composition by Martin Daske, with which DeutschlandRadio Berlin opened its series of programs for the millennium. The radio play works though the 20th century as a collage of digitised original sound recordings, which were composed throughout according to the strict pattern of a noise-music score. "Sound souvenirs" of the different decades of the past century are created from the multi-layered, complex materials.The 2nd part will be broadcast in one year for the turn of the millennium
"Rainforest" is an acoustic meditation on the rainforest. The arrangement of percussion, recordings from the rainforest, poems and street surveys reflects the different facets of the topic. The course of a day in the rainforest serves as the structure for the composition: Just before dawn, insects and frogs, start with a few isolated sounds, in the course of the day gusts of wind and rain, at dusk and nightfall the animal calls getting ever quieter.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is - infinite". The English poet William Blake attempted in his prophetic texts to describe the existential extremes of good and evil as essential antagonisms. The 20th Century is approaching Blake's writings musically, as Allen Ginsberg invokes: "I hope now that the musical articulation of Blake's poetry will be heard from the electronically illuminated democratic place of rock pop music mass media and will set an eternal standard for poetry"
Rupert Huber and Sam Auinger compose music from language, linguistic processes and sounds. Vocal sounds from discussions with and between the composers are assembled to form a polyphonic fictional character, which is the result of the musical, sonic and personal evolution of Sam Auinger and Rupert Huber. The heart beat serves as a basic human rhythm and base reference for any time and musical perceptions. Through the division of the "Herzschlagsonate" (Heartbeat sonata) into five movements, the different stages of life are represented.
The play traces the path to knowledge of the lonely Metatron from Greek mythology to modern times. Metatron lives in varying incarnations of different historical figures. A vortex of noises leads him to various places where he discovers his respective shape, from Odysseus to Michelangelo to the central computer. Each of the stages of incarnation embodies a principle of life, which attempts to make it possible to ascertain and experience reality.
Influx – Afflux. Sounds from three different places flow into one other; nature, civilization and musical elements form themselves into a listening stream of water, wind, scraps of speech, radio signals and ambient noise. Three sound artists each record one location, out of sight and earshot from each other, only connected through their recordings which are broadcast through headphones. The material flows back and forth between the three of them electronically, integrating itself with the current recording and thus transforming the subsequent acoustic events. A musical language is created, which helps the various sites to an interaction of sound.
The title "Tunnelvision" describes both the attitude of the Japanese poet Takuboku Ishikawa, from whose volume of poetry "Trauriges Spielzeug" (Sad Toy) some passages are quoted, and the perspective of the recording medium. Musicalized original sound recordings serve as a basis. The recordings were all made in cavities and various tubes which act as a filter through which the outside world can be heard. A second element is the text by Ishikawa spoken by a young man. A third level arises from the filtering and the digital processing of the text recording. The words are distorted and mutate to a technical song.
In October 1997, the Ars Acustica Working Group came together, an international working group of representatives of broadcasting and radio artists, at the Literary Colloquium in Berlin. The hosts of this annual conference were DeutschlandRadio Berlin and the SFB. On the first evening a "session" took place, where many of the participants introduced themselves with short examples of Ars Acustica from their own countries.In jazz, a "Jam Session" is a meeting where various musicians spontaneously improvise with each other. This is what Götz Naleppa's remix attempts to achieve. Different vocal improvisations, soundscapes and sound compositions are mixed, relationships with each other and new contexts added: a tribute to the art form of radio-art itself...
The composition is an acoustic journey into the heart of Brazil. It includes characteristic sounds from the city Rio de Janeiro as well as human and animal voices and music. Whereas for Hermeto Pascoal the meaning of the texts or words is of less importance, compared with the acoustic variations attainable with the sound material. His compositions are characterized by a love of experimentation: he combines the sound of conventional instruments for example with the sounds of pots and pans, animal sounds and the human voice.
The sound composition "AerAquaAngelusVox" is an imaginary auditory journey. Created as an acoustic meditation, it is intended to make it possible to experience the relationship between man, nature and the cosmos. The four sound layers air, water, angel and voice form a symbiotic sound structure. The beginning is made with the "life-generating" element air. This is followed by the "prima materia" water and the "spirits of the air", the birds. The fourth sound layer VOX is primarily shaped by the responsory of "De Angelis" by Hildegard von Bingen sung a capella. Together, the four sound levels form a holistic and immediate auditory experience.
In the second part of the "Memoirs of a century", hundreds of digitised original sound recordings from 1900 to today will be "destroyed". Each of these decompositions however, leads to new sound material, which now in its own way tells stories - and not just history.The memory of the original material remains.
Matilde, the baby, is having a restless night. Between waking and dreaming three fantasy worlds open to her.In her first waking dream, the only inhabitants of the Earth are a man and a woman. They have to imitate birds, in order to communicate because they do not speak a language. It is a world without words.In her second vision, the world is being listened to from the Moon: Voices, bells, war cries and machines can be heard; electronic instruments mimic Morse code.Speechlessness once again prevails in her third waking dream. Only isolated computer voices break the silence to announce: "Fine del messaggio" (End of the message).
Hanna Hartman collected material for her "Sounds of the Month" on many journeys. From the finds of the year 1998/99, which come from Sweden, Russia, China and America, a composition has emerged. The short pieces are never determined by the recording's location. Something completely new and geographically unbound comes into being in Hanna Hartman's work.In this way this sound image also leads what are in part familiar elements from the "Sounds of the Month" through landscapes, countries, cities and rooms - and yet still leave a wide area for associative listening.
The Swedish sound composer Hanna Hartman received a commission in 1997 from the radio drama workshop of DeutschlandRadio Berlin to compose every month the so-called "Sound of the Month" - a kind of "musical gap filler" following our radio plays up to the news, an independent, about 5 minute sound composition. To our surprise, this proved to be "all the rage" with the audience - we have never received as many enthusiastic requests for our pieces as we did for these miniatures. This programme idea brought Hanna Hartman the Prix Europa in autumn 1998 in the "Marketplace of Ideas" category. Back then, the idea came about of creating a large, continuous sound composition with the sound material from all of the previous sounds of the month - "Cikoria" was the result.
"Once upon a time...The idea for this project came from the desire to create a composition that can be understood by a large audience. We therefore wanted to give the piece a clear narrative structure as a basis, and so we chose the most universal and simplest narrative genre we could find, the fairy tale". (Tim Hinman)Tim Hinman's version of the Grimm's fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel" retells the old story: Historical radio and record recordings, modern storytellers, sound images from the fantasy world of the Brothers Grimm and fragments of today's fast media world continually revolving around the story itself.
"My interest in the traditional Japanese Noh theater started with the simple question: If the goal of Noh is self-awareness, how is this enlightenment brought about? I thought that the best way to find this out would be to compose a Noh play myself. Not a Noh play in the literal sense, but I have made use of a lot of the structural elements and motifs of Noh in my contemporary concept. In place of a linear plot, Noh uses a continuous circular motion to remove layers from the main character. This continually confronts listeners with new interpretations of everyday life, resulting in moments of great beauty and insight." (David Kolber)
Joachim Krebs has been working on the project series ARTIFICIAL SOUNDSCAPES for more than five years. All of the compositions in this cycle represent artificial soundscapes between pure naturalness and pure abstraction. Their sound elements are without exception of "natural" origin, the artificial aspect of the composition is created through the digital editing of all of the parameters of the organic sound sources used. Inaudible sounds become audible, the inner life of the individual noise-sound-particles is laid bare. In these organic artificial intermediate milieus, the focus is not least on a "development of transitions", the sounds of people, animals and nature becoming clean lines, pure color, clear sound, absolute rhythm. We recommend the use of stereo headphones.
The manuscript "Les jeux à deux" by the Berlin writer and artist Unica Zürn serves as the basis for this radio play. The two actors in "Les jeux à deux" are Norma and Flavio from Bellini's opera "Norma". They have a secret relationship, which runs according to strict and intuitively accepted rules. The playmates may not be physically close to each other, it may that there is not even a desire to see each other in private. The aim of the game is to practise meditation, distance and concentration.Inge Morgenroth and Ellen Fricke stage the "jeux à deux" as a voice-music-sound composition with female and male voices, choir and instrumental passages from Bellini's "Norma", percussion improvisations and their own music composition.
Dmitry Nikolaev has subjected his initial idea to the anarchy of the World Wide Web: "Person X has lost her/his memory, name, nationality and home town. At the same time however, s/he has acquired the miraculous ability to move between all languages, places and times imaginable. What will happen to X from now on? Continue!"In reply, Nikolaev received many variations of his character X, from all around the world and in many languages. These virtual voices were bound together to form a polyphonic voice collage, which conveys an impression of the endless space of the Internet, in which the people of the coming millennium communicate.
Human conscious activity is one of the discoveries of the 20th century. This phenomenon has been approached in literary terms by the "monologue intérieur" or "stream of consciousness". The composition "Mindscape" is an acoustic representation, which follows on from the multidimensional sound continuum in our heads. External stimuli such as noises, snatches of conversations, muffled noise and sounds ceaselessly penetrate into our consciousness and mingle with our feelings and memories. This constantly changing chaos is what makes up consciousness before the perceiving "I" is able to arrange the individual sensory impressions and feelings into proper order. "Mindscape" is an expedition into the "Babylon inside the skull".
The sound artists Bordoni and Dalo imagine an acoustic space, characterised by a centre and their (personal) environment – a circle. This space becomes audible through their following the traces of sounds and voices, and thereby themselves move ever further from the centre towards the periphery. The "physical state" of this sound image remains circular, as does the wave which is carried further and further away from the origin and whose meaning comes alternately from the original and the echo, from the present and the memory, from the centre and from the circumference.
For the sound piece "Wetter" (Weather), Werner Cee recorded the different sounds made by rain over a longer period of time. In this way large-scale sound atmospheres were created and, with the aid of his own specially-developed water drop instrument, detailed recordings were made of individual drops falling in diverse states onto sound objects, forming polyrhythmic structures. This sound material was used for the composition "Wetter", both in completely unedited as well as in electronically manipulated form. Werner Cee describes his composition as an "acoustic cultural landscape": "Here," says the composer, "natural, random events and calculated, constructed elements come together and combine to create a soundscape that can be likened to a cultural landscape: the weather, lighting conditions, and geographical features are uncontrolled aspects of a landscape. Human intervention, in the form of plantations or the building of roads and buildings, restructures the picture and connects interactively with nature, which is often what makes up the unique charm of a landscape. "Now listen to how chance and calculation are potrayed in a rain drop game
The media world is becoming ever more brutal and free of taboos. Compared with the range of computer games or cinema and television, the old game of "Schiffe versenken" (Battleships) seems harmless, in which children imitate the "dangerous" combat sounds. Stefano Giannotti has taken the structure of "battleships" as the basis for a composition that tells of real brutality, of chaos, war, relentless destruction: a sound composition on the theme of power. The sounds for this piece come from different genres, from the world of politics - past and present, as well as from our media environment. The imaginary players make their moves eager for victory, yet guessing coordinates at random, and they all lose to Giannotti. ...a hit!
"Staying alone in a room... and movement interferes, the noise-lessness grows, stays, until the surroundings panic and collapse in your mind."
The poem "New York 48th Floor" tells of loneliness. The voices are locked in a New York skyscraper and look down on the relentless hustle and bustle of city life. This silence transforms itself into an associative space: Sounds of imagination and reality compete with and disturb each other, until painful dissonance comes into being. The protagonists of isolation are voices, noises, texts and instruments such as the double bass or piano: They set the psychic borderline situation of solitariness in music.
The author has taken the train from Berlin to Romania. The journey took her one week. On her route she passed the stations of Prague and Budapest, Bucharest was the end of the line. Hanna Hartman eavesdropped on these three stations with a microphone. There are similarities, but each station has it's own sound. In the feature these three stations meet acoustically across borders and over distances in a space that the author has composed for them. The feature is a sound collage of travellers and people waiting.
In the so-called fight against terrorism, multilingual language recognition programmes are being used worldwide to search telephone, fax and email connections for suspicious "emotive words".Rupert Huber examines the phenomenon of "censorship", the character of which is transformed in the course of the piece from a specific prohibition into a fighting machine fearfully lashing out around itself.Thus the catalogue of stimulus words, once drawn up from the fear of possible consequences, has to grow continuously, as paraphrases and synonyms are used to help. Ultimately, everything is forbidden, and the censor himself becomes suspect.
"Trilogie für Windgeneratoren" (Trilogy for wind generators) is a composition for wind and blade strokes. Three huge wind turbines produce a changing sound here that is picked up by microphones and transmitted by radio into a locked room. 3000 meters away from the wind turbines, the sound of the blade strokes and rotation can be heard on the speaker, such as would not be noticeable in nature. Depending on wind strength, differentiated sounds arise over the course of several days – music is created."Seewetter 69" (Sea Weather 69) plays with the daily shipping forecast from 1969.In the "Konzert für Harley Davidson und gemischten Chor" (Concert for Harley Davidson and mixed choir) technology and singing meet.
José Mataloni has developed his "magic realism of sound" in the style of "magic realism" in literature - which has mainly become famous due to the author Gabriel Garcia Márquez. In his sound pieces he transforms sounds from the environment recorded with a microphone into electro-acoustic music; the specific material changes into poetic and fantastic sound worlds.The foundations of his pieces are sound recordings from his native Argentina and his current home in Germany.
6 sound pieces entitled:
1. Sonidos Lejanos
2. Tiempo Dos
3. Ensonacion Portena
4. Piazzollage
5. Magma
6. Nachtmusik
Nicola Sani dedicates this piece to Luigi Nono to mark the 10th anniversary of his death. Sani found his own musical language by following in Nono's footsteps, at the time new territory in composition. "The piece is based on the search for a new dramaturgic function of vocality. The sequence of the texts does not represent a completed narrative, but rather defines sounds and musical sequences, which by association or contraposition follow chains of thought and the poetry of all ages, from antiquity up to the present time. It is an inner meditation, a personal dedication to the cultural world in which I was trained and which has a particular significance for my language of expression." (Sani)Length of German composure: 00:47:44
"The body that is Lauren's voice breathes and pulsates, is alive and "on the road", it has detached itself from Lauren herself and is developing its own sonic life. It alternates between organic breathing and mechanical pulsation and occupies different states of motion and stasis." (Sabine Schäfer)The composer takes a trip into the interior of the singer Lauren Newton. Individually selected vocal sounds were digitally recorded, broken down into the smallest pieces, examined and artistically processed. What appears to be scientific work, opens to the listener another, a new world of vocal sound, in which the friction between humans and machines, strangeness and familiar corporeality, naturalness and artificiality can be heard.
Faust, following moving and shocking events nevertheless accepted into heaven, desperately tries to justify his way of life on earth and is no longer able to understand what he himself is saying. Not on account of the loud singing of the angels, but because of the different nature of heavenly language. Nonetheless he overindulges his speech and his "Faustian vitality" and forgets himself in the depths of the moment, which turns out to be exactly what he had been arduously seeking in the first two parts of J.W. von Goethe's tragedy.This composition for voice and gongs originated during the work on "Die Gesetzestafeln" (The Tablets of the Law), a piece from 1999 that was produced in Michael Vetter's "Academia Capraia".
"Soto Voce" plays with the name of the South American sculptor Soto. Soto has created a vast sound tube sculpture in Tuscany which stands outdoors on a small hill. Michael Vetter and his colleague Natasha Nikprelevic have improvised to connect their voices with the sounds from the sculpture generated by the wind, and have thus composed a piece out of the sounds of the tube sculpture, voices and the sounds of nature in the Tuscan landscape.
The overtone improvisation "De Profundis" lets the voices of both artists sound in an old tank which is to be found in Rocca, also in Tuscany.
The Belgian composer and radio artist Ward Weis describes his sound compositions as "cartoons". His pictures are put together from many small fragments which originate from his own pen and are imaginary. "In this way it is possible to create improbable things, reality can be called into question by all kinds of ideas." (Ward Weis)Weis' sound cartoons tell stories. For this he collects the sounds of landscapes and cities, visits animals at night or listens to the interiors of steel structures.The author has assembled excerpts from old and new works for this programme in order to present himself to the German radio public for the first time.
A "journey on paper": The long distance from Australia to Brazil, covered in letters. Two countries lying far away from each other, two languagesthat are alien to each other, become audible, converge and dance together. The fantasy of the "boats of paper" creates a place where language, sounds and images interact with each other, without having to pass through cultural or political boundaries. The result is a "Terra Incognita", released from logical time and space information, in which poetry and songs become the means of sensual and musical communication.
"Soto Voce" plays with the name of the South American sculptor Soto. Soto has created a vast sound tube sculpture in Tuscany which stands outdoors on a small hill. Michael Vetter and his colleague Natasha Nikprelevic have improvised to connect their voices with the sounds from the sculpture generated by the wind, and have thus composed a piece out of the sounds of the tube sculpture, voices and the sounds of nature in the Tuscan landscape.
The overtone improvisation "De Profundis" lets the voices of both artists sound in an old tank which is to be found in Rocca, also in Tuscany.
To fly is mankind's greatest dream, to crash its greatest disaster.The authors Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit have dedicated their play to the brief descent before the airflow under the wings stops and the plane disappears from the monitors. What remains is the black box, which records everything that is spoken in the cockpit right up to the end. Authentic protocols form the centrepiece of the documentary radio play.
The desert wind and the aeolian sounds of the sand form music in this sound piece. The wind lets different resonating objects sing in its air stream, blows gently across the ground, carries sand with it and shapes the desert space. Aerial photographs of dune formations served Andreas Bick as sheet music for his piece made up of modulated wind noises. His composition consists of the interaction between mounted and accelerated wave movements of the sand and the real acoustic spaces of the desert: the gentle sounds of the sparse vegetation, the trickling of the falling sand and finally abandoned ghost towns, which have been buried by sand dunes, and in which the wind plays with old telegraph lines, broken windows and loose pieces of metal.
In the Spunkkrachlexikon by and with Frieder Butzmann – like in every dictionary – it's a question of hard facts – only more fun: Sorted solely by the sequence of letters (Z-A), information is given on the subject of hearing. Under keywords such as "Zirbeldrüse" (pineal gland), "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah", "Ohrensausen" (tinnitus), "Maulwurf" (mole), "Geräusch" (noise), "fühlen" (feel), and "dröhnen" (booming) you can look up or listen to what Frieder Butzmann associates with it. Find out about acoustic illusions, the chemical toilet on an ICE train, the big bang or information about musical quantum leaps, harmonies and cacophonies. The Spunkkrachlexikon was put on the "www" from its broadcast date and can be heard letter by letter in Real Audio format on the DLR website.
If we concentrate when listening to a piece, we experience two levels of time: the exact time that we need for the reception of the piece and time in the fictional sense, which is shortened or in slow motion, yet however also runs simultaneously with reception. Z | S plays with the change of perspective between hearing what is happening and active listening. Christian Calon was inspired for his game with time by the situation in a radio drama studio and moves his musical events through two rooms. The "control room" is equipped with sound sequences that are sent into the "recording room", where they are manipulated, transformed and "lifted out of time" within the hearing event.
Molly Bloom, protagonist of the final episode of "Ulysses" by James Joyce, scans through all the threads of the story in her soliloquy and weaves them back together again. Divided into eight sentences without punctuation, the text provokes a kind of hypnosis, a loss of sense, caused by the overlapping and collision of ideas. This loss of sense can however create a free space which activates the imagination. Disjointedness is no longer an obstacle, but rather the door to more open perception. The two composers have tracked down all of the words that make one think of tones and sounds in Joyce's original English text and in the German and French translations. An odyssey develops through Joyce's text, through a woman's sea of thought.
The composer Luc Ferrari undertakes an aleatory trip to the southwest of the United States. Day by day, the route unfolds, day by day, encounters in sound are made, people encountered, day by day life is woven from coincidences."This is neither a documentary nor a soundscape, nor a radio play, nor an electro-acoustic work, nor a portrait, nor an exposé of true-life recording, nor is it... It's a composition! What else can I say? Perhaps that the subtitle could be: Sound poem from life." (Luc Ferrari)
The "E 71" is a road through a destroyed border area. The eponymous volume of poetry by Peter Waterhouse is a document of the helplessness and speechless in the face of the devastation wreaked by the war in the area around the long besieged city of Bihać in the former Yugoslavia. The text is characterized by pauses that speak more than words about the terror. Andreas Fervers reproduces this brittle writing space musically. In his sound room, three speakers and a large drum act fragmentarily, disconnectedly, and always - individually. Neither dialogues nor comments, nor polyphonic structures can emerge where human life belongs to the past.
For this project, the term "Hausmusik" (house music) was taken literally: The composer Thomas Gerwin and the sound engineer Lutz Pahl were out and about in the DeutschlandRadio Berlin broadcasting studio to capture sounds both typical and unusual for the place: Fragments of music recordings, spoken word and studio atmospheres, or even just the silence of an empty cellar.In the sense of "Musique Concrète", Thomas Gerwin isolates the tones recorded in reality, fanning them out tonally and thus freeing them from their original meaning.This composition is a very personal, subjective and idiosyncratic musical portrait of our broadcasting studio in Berlin-Schöneberg.
John Cage and his famous "Roaratorio, the composition on "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce, inspired Ward Weis to this radio play. Its literary source is the unfinished text by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400), "The Canterbury Tales", a collection of stories in verse that tells of a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas of Canterbury.Tom Hanna approaches Chaucer's medieval English text in the spirit of the master Cage, seeking the sounds, noises, images and places in the words and setting them to music.The title "Chauncecleer" results from the connection with a character from Chaucer's tales, "Chauntecleer": a rooster, who pluckily repels imminent death and sends it away for the time being...
Arsenije Jovanovič has already created a series of "acoustic books" that record in sound the personal impressions and feelings collected on his journeys. Jovanovič, who seeks the independence of language and designation, "writes" using sounds, creating in this way acoustic territories for himself and the listener that offer a broad, almost border-free space for their own images in their heads. Thus the space inside a cathedral is remembered or the vastness the author experienced on Mount Athos.
Noise causes illness, it is said. Constant stress and strain more and more frequently lead to acute hearing loss. But Felix Kubin is a representative of "Noise Culture", he is fascinated by what others perceive as disturbing: the noise of the city, the crackling of a broken radio, vapid yet relentless muzak, the painful feedback of an overdriven microphone... As children of the electronic age, of globalization and data terror, the noise artists return the everyday, aggressive media trash to its producers in a radical and imaginative way. Krachmusik (Noise Music) is an impulse of rebellion, a response to overfeeding and the over-stimulation of our senses in the information age, a battle with the resources of the enemy, the outcry of the "misfits" – counter-noise.
Underway - by train, plane, car, on foot through water, building sites and machine shops. "Traum.Reise." is a symphonic acoustic movement through the borderland between "real" and "dreamed" places. Frank Niehusmann composes his voices and noises using modern computer programmes and also with the aid of "historic" techniques such as making tape loops with sellotape which he also uses in his concerts. He has been collecting sounds and noises of all kinds for many years during his travels and in studio experiments, in order to process these in his compositions for concerts, sound installations, film and theatre music.
The world above ground opens itself to us through our eyes, the world below through our ears. Inside a cave, drops break their way into the silence and take us further and further down... In the cycle of poems enitled "Nachtkarst", Károly Koller undertakes a lyrical "advance into the depths", fragments of an expedition become visible: the ascent to the cave entrance, the descent into the depths where fissures and narrow places block the path. Silence, cold, night and time are the recurring themes of the radio play. The labyrinth below ground becomes audible in the maze of sounds and words, the expedition develops into an advance into the depths of man's inner self.
One need only visit Berlin's Olympic stadium once during a Bundesliga football match in order to experience truly impressive worlds of sound. Tens of thousands of people shouting, ranting, clapping, booing, singing or forming choruses. Weekly ecstatic mass concerts. These mass voices - in all their diversity - form the foundation, the orchestra, this composition. The musical counterpoint are two singing voices. They stand up against the crowd and sing to texts by Walt Whitman the irreplaceability of the individual.
The scientist, naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt is the focus of this composition by Daniel Velasco. 200 years ago Humboldt travelled to Cuba and there - quite in keeping with his cross-disciplinary science - went on a quest for insights about nature and man. He recorded many of his experiences and thoughts in writing. Acoustic images from Havana, Trinidad and the Alejandro de Humboldt national park appear in Velasco's composition: Places that Humboldt visited and where he researched in the early 19th century are made "audible" here. The texts from Humboldt's travel diaries are quoted in four languages and form the musical counterpoint to Cuba's rich and diverse soundscape.
"Some spirits inhabit human bodies, some the bodies of animals, they inhabit plants, stones, minerals, and nothing is without spirit and intellect...". Giordano Bruno, born near Naples in 1548, fell victim to the Inquisition at the age of 52 on account of his teachings of the infinity of the world and the equality of all religions and world systems. Giordano Bruno's ideas from his work "On Magic" inspired Mario Verandi to a metaphorical sound journey through a world of spirits and demons. In this composition, they slip into voices, tones and sounds and are brought to life one more time.Some gosts live in the human body, some in the bodies of animals and plants, stones, minerals. Nothing is without sence and intellect. Giordani Bruno, born 1548 in Neaple in Italie, was murdered at the age of 52 because he said, that all religions and all world systems are equal. Giordano Brunos’ thoughts in his novel “Magic” inspired Mario Verandi for his metaphorical sound journey throughout a world of gosts an demons. In this composition they hide in voices, sounds and music and return to life for one more time.
"If I as a painter design a surface, I have to work in shifts. The application of a single layer paint would simply lead to a lifeless coating. If I however build up the colour from a variety of different, loosely overlapping areas, so that the respective undercoat always shows through and has its say, then I can create a complex colour, which shimmers and oscillates in itself." (W. Cee)In "Monochrom", the composer Werner Cee draws on his experience in painting. The focus of the composition does not lie in its temporal structure, but rather in the stratification of a noise surface. The sounds overlap each other without covering each other. They form a shimmering, dazzling web of sound moving within itself.
"11 clock in the morning on 15th August, Ferragosto, a wonderful, gentle morning breeze is blowing across the countryside – I'm just listening to a three-dimensional sound installation, imperceptibly controlled by the voices of insects and winds, I feel like a drunk sound editor and very comfortable too..."That's exactly what I want to hear in a sound piece from you", the radio drama editor replied by return post.Ferragosto, a public holiday in Italy, introduced by the Emperor Augustus, the hottest day of the year, a day that is shimmers, paralyses and is energetic at the same time. Alvin Curran captured his Ferragosto in this sound piece.
The composer Luc Ferrari travels with a tape recorder. He has brought back original sounds and atmospheres from almost everywhere around the world and woven them together as compositions in numerous radio plays. For his new piece "Les Anecdotiques", he has used recordings from Japan, Spain, France, Mexico, California and Berlin.Luc Ferrari coined the term "anecdotic music" in the '60s to describe his "acoustic photos", his minimalistically composed soundscapes and travel portraits."Les Anecdotiques" now closes a circle ranging from Ferrari's early works in anecdotic music up to his mature work.
Wooden clogs / clock mechanisms / rattling trains / the ice cream man's bell / a beetle crunching / jet fighters / milk churns / spades in the garden / Granny Möcker calling...The list of sounds from our childhood seems endless. The musician and composer Stephan Froleyks quotes examples from his own personal archive of sound memories. From a multitude of specific sounds and verbal descriptions of sounds, he has composed a purely acoustic life story. As subjective and self-occupied these audio recordings are, all those born in the 60s will also recognize many things: a squeaking dummy / the school bell / the theme song of a radio show / spoons in dessert bowls / Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert / reggae by Bob Marley...
The composer Thomas Gerwin constructs a virtual landscape of sounds."I am populating this landscape with large and small acoustic beings, which appear individually, in pairs or in droves. These beings live in this soundscape, they are born, grow and evolve, some also die during the piece." (T. Gerwin)The composer builds his virtual world of sound in the computer chapter by chapter; the beings are created and further developed - however: the further the process advances, the more independent the sound creatures become. They increasingly decide themselves on the metamorphoses they undergo...The composer allows you to "look over his shoulder" during this piece. The listeners accompany him in his deliberations on the construction of the sound labyrinth up to editing in the sound studio.
This radio play is the third part of a trilogy that Stefano Giannotti began in 1999. "Fine del messaggio" (DLR 1999) deals with communication, "Battaglia Navale" (DLR 2000) addresses the themes of power and violence. The composition "Calendario" now devotes itself to time and its memories."The protagonists of Calendario could actually be the survivors of the last battle in 'Battaglia Navale', who have sought shelter on a lonely mountain and want to leave something behind from there for the next generation." (S. Giannotti)"Calendario" musically lists events that have shaped, shocked and delighted mankind: Verdi's birthday, the bombing of Hiroshima, the first birthday cake, the first step on the moon...
Sphex, in his early 20s, meets Sunshine, a 17-year-old student in a chat room. They flirt, but then Sunshine submerges back into the cybercosmos. Fortunately, there's a lot happening in the party room, Sphex mingles with the distinguished guests... He immerses himself with the listener into the anarchic float of the Internet chat room and encounters an oscillating word-sound-world. In the style of the medieval musical form of the motet, which uses different texts, melodies, languages and rhythms simultaneously, the sum of the different forms of communication in the chat sound space becomes a listening experience. Dialogues, small stories, truths and lies are hidden beneath the chaotic surface. Heiner Grenzland traces these and musically sounds out the transition between anonymity and intimacy.
For more than 32 years, the International Festival for Electroacoustic Music "Synthèse" has taken place annually in the French city of Bourges, organized by the "Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges (Imeb)". A full program is presented: the spectrum ranges from purely musical pieces, to radio art, sound installations and performances right up to audiovisual works. The annual competition had already served as a springboard into the professional world for new talent. In the meantime, "Synthèse" has become an important forum for international exchange. Alongside the competition pieces in 2001, there was also sound art from Korea, England, Italy, Portugal, Chile, Canada, Mexico, Norway and Brazil on the program. Nathan Singer attended the festival in Bourges in June 2001 and selected a number of radiophonic pieces, which she will present in the radio drama workshop.
The Arcana, the picture cards from the card game Tarot, serve as a source of inspiration and can offer suggestions for lifestyles in a playful way. The "Juggler" stands for inspiration, the "Popess" for knowledge, the "Emperor" for philosophy, the "Empress" for magic, the "Pope" for the idea of divine incarnation in man, the "Lovers" for temptation, the "Chariot" for the triumph over temptation... Each Arcanum in the Tarot counts as a universally valid psychological and spiritual archetype. José Mataloni's composition sketches the path of an "Initiation into Magic". "In this sound piece I adopt the attitude of the Hermetic philosophers, who are open for all ideas and religions, in order to combine them to form a whole." (J. Mataloni)
The composer Cathy Milliken collected her auditory information with a microphone: Construction sites, rehearsals, walks, music and recordings of nature. In "New Looks" she lets these sounds encounter piano music and vocals. Shakespeare's sonnets tell of timelessness and the passage of time, at the same time they organize and structure the acoustic material by intonation and metre. "The processing and setting into relation of these acoustic impressions and elements recall photographs that permit a very personal reality to be experienced through cross fading, inversion, magnification, repetition, solarization and snapshot." (C. Milliken)
The composer Elżbieta Sikora, born in Lvov, Poland, is one of the best-known composers of electro-acoustic music at the international level. Originally a pianist, she became a sound engineer and subsequently studied electro-acoustic music with Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle in Paris. From then on she was able to combine her musical and technical skills. She has composed numerous works for instruments and tape. Elżbieta Sikora's works are performed in many countries and at festivals of contemporary and electro-acoustic music. She has lived and worked in Paris since 1981 and since 2000 also in Hamburg and Ulm.
Fred Wiggins spoke with Elżbieta Sikora and has selected various compositions from her complete oeuvre for this portrait.
What does white sugar sound like when it is poured into a bowl? How dull is the "plop" when an inverted plastic cup is plunged into water? In February 2002, two Berlin school classes had a unique opportunity to experiment with sound art in the Radio Drama Studio at DeutschlandRadio Berlin. Yves Coffy from the imeb (Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique) in Bourges has run this special project for children since 1972, in the framework of which the "Cybersongosse" was invented: a network of several small desks with microphones and various mixing and playback functions. These devices make playing with sounds and noises "child's play". In this programme, Nathalie Singer documents how the "true newcomers to sound art" learn how to compose.
"During my community service I worked a lot with people with speech impediments. I was fascinated by these voices, their extreme sound and their expressiveness and decided to dedicate a piece to them." (A. Bosetti) In Bosetti's composition, the voices of spastics, aphasia patients and laryngectomees become musical material. From this language, commonly perceived as deformed and ugly, he creates a unique abstract musical aesthetic. Due to the extreme slowness we hear the voices as if through an acoustic magnifying glass and develop a sensitivity for the emotional quality of details that we would otherwise ignore. "Il Fiore della Bocca" is a composition of speech.
Cuba - a dream destination for travellers, the myth of the socialist revolution, and a longing for Caribbean simplicity. When Werner Cee travelled to Cuba in 1998, his impression was out of focus. For three weeks he explored the islands with his tape recorder. He stumbles upon the story of "Che" Guevara's hands, which were chopped off by the Bolivian army as proof of their victory. Sounds and noises lead us to a world between times, where horse-drawn carts drive along motorways and the splendour of the past has long since decayed.Werner Cee condenses the original sounds into a poetic composition, assembles sounds from the streets of Havana to create a surrealistic painting and allows specific noises to become sound metaphors.
The heart is not just a bodily organ, the heart is a mythical place. Many cultures attribute a significance to the heart which refers to feelings, beliefs or the supernatural. The Aztec warriors tore open their prisoners' chests at the top of the pyramids and held the twitching hearts in the sun. A heart for the Gods. What the conquering Spaniards considered to be the height of barbarity, was for the victims nothing more than a religious rite. They died cheerfully and calmly: "This is the blissful death, that our ancestors proclaimed and praised for us." The cruelty of the Europeans was of a different nature. Wilhelm Hauff recorded it symbolically in his fairy tale "Das steinerne Herz" (The Heart of Stone): "Such a heart feels neither anxiety nor terror, neither foolish compassion nor other grief."Iris Disse (Story and direction)has embarked on a journey into the heart of two worlds. With the sound engineer Peter Avar (Direction), she has visited ritual festivals in Mexico and contrasted them with European perceptions of the heart.
"The auditory sense of Mr. Roderick Usher" responds abnormally acutely to steps, voices, the quietest noises. But what is the cause of his clairaudience? Why he is smitten with this painful hypersensitivity? And are the many voices which Roderick Usher hears at outsize volumes utterances of one and the same personality? Furudate interpreted Usher's suffering as the suffering of Eros: as a distorted, outrageous desire that sinks into audio intoxication.
Noise Opera „Der Niedergang des Hauses Usher“ nach Edgar Allan Poe
Desert. No man's land. A few people are building a city that is so splendid that it shines from afar. But other tribes soon come, attack, and destroy it and build a new city on the ruins. A process that repeats itself endlessly. Every new city combines all of the previous cities in itself. Until one day, the city of all cities is built: one that unites hundreds of styles and forms of life within itself. But it is so complex that no one wants to live in it. And so the city becomes a monument without life, a tourist attraction for holidaymakers."The Masterpiece" is a metaphor for the creative process of art and not least, a very ironic reflection on the function of art in society.
Volcanoes: bound, sleeping power. Years of silence, soundlessly slumbering. Then suddenly the concentrated energy is discharged in a roaring concert of sound: along with the bursts of fire, threatening sounds emanate from the earth, mingling with the muffled sound of the massive boulders and leaving behind desolate cratered landscapes. "Cratere" is what the Italians call the huge holes left behind by the eruption of Mount Etna and other volcanoes. In her sound piece, Hanna Hartman has collected and processed recordings of the eruptions of Mount Etna and other volcanoes, especially in Italy and Costa Rica, and assembled them to a sound composition.
This unique interpretation of old folk songs is like a continuation of the way in which they are passed on, the continual change through oral transmission, even if it does break with the traditional methods of reception. "A key concern of the audio work 'VOLKSLIED' (Folk song) was the point at which the actual speech of the folk song, which is expressed in the form of a song, the sound and the simplicity of the text, turns into a much more abstract narrative of memory." (Chr. Korn). "Volkslied" is a continuation of the work that began with "Volksliedmaschine" ('Folk song machine' HR 2002).
The handling of and playing with existing material, the free processing of tones, words, sounds and images form the focus of the performances and CD projects by the band Negativland from San Francisco (USA). Negativland incorporates found fragments of previously published music into their compositions and has been demonised for this by copyright representatives, declared heroes by like-minded people. NEGATIVLAND "steals" music from other people, but rebuilds it into something that appears to the group as a more honest statement. NEGATIVLAND takes the attitude that a refusal to be original in the traditional sense is the only way to make art with any depth in a world of commodity capitalism.
John Palmer collected the acoustic material for his radio piece on a four-week tour of Japan in October 2001. Besides the everyday life on the noisy streets of the cities what interested him above all were the places of retreat: Buddhist monasteries and Zen temples.In the recording studio, he transformed his recordings into a metaphorical journey into the world of Zen Buddhism and into our inner selves. Buddhist prayers and chants, temple bells and poems in which Palmer captured his emotional and spiritual experiences during his stay - the exploration of Eastern philosophy seen from a Western-oriented perspective.
"apónivi" – in the language of the Hopi Indians means "wind that blows down the canyon", the wind that passes through the huge canyons in their reservations. It carries with it the spirits of the invisible powers of life, the "Kachinas". But these are only visible in the dance wearing elaborate masks.
The play is an acoustic exploration of the ritual mask dances of the Kachinas, whose symbolic importance is reflected in musical pictures. Embedded into the rhythm in particular of the virtuoso drummer Terry Bozzio, the libretto plays with the sound of the Hopi language, with associations, meanings and misinterpretations of their culture.
For the duration of the MaerzMusik festival (14.3. to 23.03.2003) DeutschlandRadio Berlin was a guest in the SONIC ARTS LOUNGE of the Berlin Festival House, or Haus der Berliner Festspiele, to perform sound art live as part of the night programme. The motto for one of the evenings was: KLANGKUNST (SOUND ART) meets TANGO = KLANGO. Therefore a tango, which for once does not require a bandoneon, but instead is composed of noises, electro-acoustic elements and concrete sounds. Many internationally renowned sound artists were invited by the Radio Drama Workshop, to compose 3 to 5-minute "Klangos". Very different compositions were created – with one thing in common: You can dance tango to them. That is precisely what the dancers from the tango scene in Berlin, who were in the SONIC ARTS LOUNGE, did until late in the night.
"... an empty theatre gives me an eerie feeling: it seems to me as if all the objects and machines would suddenly come to life again. And the voices of all the actors and opera singers who have ever stood on its stage began to whisper in the boxes and tiers..." (after Luigi Pirandello). When Mario Verandi returns to the old Teatro de San Nicolas built in 1908 in Buenos Aires, back to where his family has lived and worked for four generations, it turns into just such a magical place. Into a Theatrum Sonorum, into an auditory theatre of sounds and noises. Old theatre ghosts come on stage to present us the voices and the sounds of times gone past.
"Okyo" is the name of the prayer texts which Zen monks in the Far East recite as a spoken song. They are sung on a tone to visualise they are beyond all emotions. Here, the Okyo is understood primarily as a phonetic experience, as a sound event which puts the meaning of the texts in the background. "For years my Okyo meditations consisted of improvisational drill processes concerning the inner life of the tones. For many hours every day, while singing I observed the tone, how it went into and came out from within itself." (M. Vetter) Traditional Zen music forms the starting point for this audio piece, in which Michael Vetter and Natasha Nikeprelevic reinterpret the Okyos while adding instruments. They demonstrate in particular their ability to masterfully produce harmonics.
Based on James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," the radio play tells the story of a woman who is weary of the banality of everyday life in the Irish city of Dublin. She throws herself into the River Liffey and dies. She then floats out on the river into the vastness of the sea, from which she returns as gentle Irish rain.Sound compositions, text and music play with the surreal moments of the story, and make what is not rationally comprehensible nevertheless acoustically audible: Feelings of being excluded, sadness, resignation and yearning for a better world.
Kathryn and Peter are crossing Antarctica is a radio opera. As a conceptional journey it involves the stories of the English-Australian recorder duo Kathryn, Peter and their son Tim, Sir Robert Falcon Scott‘s tragic race for the South Pole, microtonal recorder music, a song cycle, scientific information and a dramatic acusmatic storm. All these elements are interwoven to create a sonic event that places the listener somewhere between facts and fiction, between sound art, music and drama.
with Kathryn Bennetts und Peter Bowman (recorder), Tim Bowman, Claudia Kemmerer (soprano), Lutz Gillmann (piano), Anja Gough, Made in Britain, Chor der Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf, Moseley Shoals, Oliver Clark, Joachim Datko, Geraldine Dufour, Dr. Kerstin Evert, Boris Michael Gruhl, Keith Homer, Adam Hopkins, Chris Sangwin, Felix Störtzer, Alexandra Taylor, Klaus Thomas, Susannah Wilson wind: Dugal McKinnon music: Michael Wolters Sound Recordist (recorders): Davis Holmes Sound Editor: Peter Batchelor concept, composition, text, realisation: Marcus Droß und Michael Wolters
TERMINUS means both term and boundary. The radio play focuses on borders: between people, between countries, borders of perception, of language, the border between life and death. If terms become shaky in borderline situations, the sound takes us further: Language on the border between meaningfulness and pure sound. Instrumental actions breaking out from the sounds of speech, also blurring the border between speech and music. The realm of the terms in TERMINUS is defined by two textual layers: by a text by Leonardo da Vinci about the Flood and by fragments of text mostly of literary origin, in which borders and border situations are discussed.
"Berlin is not a city of dreams, too loud, too rough, too much energy!", according to the two musicians Sam Auinger and Hannes Strobl. Originally from Austria, both of them have lived in Berlin for a long time, the last three years in the district of Prenzlauer Berg. For six months, the musicians listened into their city more closely, captured sounds which usually pass us all by unnoticed, and conducted a very special kind of field research into urban rhythms and city sounds. The result was a completely subjective view of Berlin and also the realisation that the border between East and West is still recognisable, particularly through the sound of the road surface.
Ulrike Draesner's poem "Cliff" is about two lovers who come together in an impressive, but also rugged countryside. Through the poet's delivery their written words find an appropriate acoustic form. Cries and whispers, the spoken and the heard, sounds and images come together as passionate linguistic music. The composer Sandeep Bhagwati traces the music in this poetry, picks up the rhythm of the music of the words and continues to play around with it musically.
An architectural commentary is a form of ‘reviewing’ architecture, in which functional, symbolic and aesthetic aspects of a building or a bigger architectural structure are analyzed.Inspiration for this cycle of compositions is drawn from architectural criticism, structures, buildings, involuntary cityscapes (‘architecture without architects’), and technological noise within buildings.Together they cover three different areas of work: 80 minutes of sound, a catalogue of photographs, and line graphs that stem from volume and stereo pan settings in the multitrack composition software.
"Architectural Commentaries 4 & 5" has also been published on CD: Entr'acte (http://www.entracte.co.uk).
Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting "The Sea of Ice" provided the impetus for this project. The painting has been cited over and again as an icon of the scepticism of progress. For the composer Werner Cee a similar symbolism clings to an industrial ruin in Bitterfeld, a never-used water tank - particularly evident during the flood disaster in the summer of 2002. Werner Cee confronted musicians with the image of Frederick in the resonant "sound tank" and lets the piece arise as part of the improvisational processes. The unifying sound element is the e-Ch'in, his electronic Chinese zither. It's long reverberations lead to paralysis and "deceleration" like the floes drifting in Caspar David Friedrich's Sea of Ice.
The play on words and saying "Tradurre - Tradire" implies: "Translation means betrayal, deceit." In his composition Frank Corcoran quite literally addresses this fundamental problem of any language translation and communication. Based on a short poem by the Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock and its English and German translations, Corcoran creates a network of relations in his electro-acoustic work between meanings and misinterpretations. The polyphonic sound composition for four voices leads the attentive listener into philosophical abysses.
"MaerzMusik" (MarchMusic), the International Festival of Contemporary Music under the umbrella of the Berlin Festspiele, turned its speakers up once again this year from 19th to 28th March to make the diversity of trends and approaches in contemporary music audible. And Deutschlandradio Berlin once again participated live, as a partner of the festival and organiser of the SONIC ARTS LOUNGE, which presented projects from sound art to club culture in night-time performances. This year, the SAL presented itself with the "Nordischen Nacht" (Nordic Night): Sound artists from the Scandinavian countries presented the latest developments in sound art. You could hear the percussionist, author and sound virtuoso Sven Åke Johansson, who was born in Sweden in 1943 and has lived in Berlin for many years. It was also possible to listen to sound artist Hanna Hartman, who was also born in Sweden and now lives in Berlin, and the ProTon-Group (Pekka Siren and Agnieszka Waligórska) from Finland. DeutschlandRadio Berlin Radio is broadcasting the "Nordic Night" today, a recording of the Sonic Arts Lounge in the Berlin Festival House, or Haus der Berliner Festspiele.
In this work the composer looks closer at the fundamentals of sound art, of history and the music of the 20th century. The five "thematic areas" of the composition each reflect a particular period of the 20th century: Prologue and epilogue set the time frame, TANZ (DANCE) reflects the destructive energy of turmoil, which discharged itself in the two world wars, ZEIT (TIME) the traumatic horror of Auschwitz and Hiroshima - and SCHWEIFUNG (UPSWEEP) the forsakenness of the last third of the century in the increasingly unreal search for something new.
The work “auf’s Glatteis” (on thin ice) by Hanna Hartman shows how you can generate unfamiliar noises and unexpected sounds with only a hot plate and a little ice.
Sonic Arts Lounge revisited 1
Jungle music with percussion and vocals
by Sven Åke Johansson and Rüdiger Carl
For many years, Jovanovič and his tape recorder have recorded the different moods and atmospheres around a wall, which protects his property from the powers of the sea, the Adriatic near the Croatian city of Rovinj.The examination of the sound material confronted him more and more with his own history. At the same time, the wind shifted in the diversity of its appearances into the centre of his attention. He had traversed many seas as a sailor and the wind regulated his life in exile on the Adriatic coast. The four-part composition is like a four-time approach, which penetrates ever deeper into the element of wind and into his subjective perception. It is a confrontation with the force of nature, the moods, but also the significance of wind.
The German sound artist Felix Kubin and his Polish counterpart Wojtek Kucharczyk are involved in a sound battle in no man's land. To do this, they plundered the acoustic cultural trash from their own countries sending it in the form of MP3 files against the other side – German noise and Polish counter-noise: a singing traffic light sent against Slavic dogs barking against the national anthem without a bottom bracket... "Scream first, then regret nothing" – under this premise a piece was created that lets all the German-Polish prejudices sink into the noise yet at the same time without hurting your ears.Felix Kubin, born 1969, graduate psychotronician. He explores the effects of noise phenomena, specializing in Dadatronic and Sci-Fi Pop for his own label "Gagarin Records". Radio plays include "Syndikat für Gegenlärm" (Syndicate of Counter-Noise, DLR Berlin 2001).Wojtek Kucharczyk, born in Poland in 1969, is an all-round artist who is in the vanguard of Polish Electronic Pop with his record label "mik.musik".
The Arcana, the picture cards of a Tarot deck, already inspired José Mataloni to a first composition ("Die Arcana", DLR Berlin, 2002). Now he once again takes up the motif of randomly selected card reading musically and in so doing questions the Arcana as the source of divination. Nine further picture cards are laid, nine acoustic symbols can be freely interpreted by the listener: The Devil, Death, The Wheel of Fortune, The Tower, Temperance, Justice, Judgement, Strength and The Hanged Man. "The dealer is imaginary and thus sows the seeds for the subjective perception of the listener as well as that of the composer – so that a dialogue can develop between the two." (J. Mataloni)
Diotima, the female character from Holderlin's "Hyperion", and Eurydice, the wife of the mythical Orpheus, represent the crisis in the relationship between men and women in this piece. In both narratives, the male heroes prefer to mourn their dead wives rather than live with them lovingly. Quotes from Plato, Rilke or Eliot as well as a free adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage" complete the text layer of this piece. Nevertheless the focus is on the music: Flute, electric guitar and lute are the protagonists - like the three human voices. "The instruments, voices and electronic material jointly interpret the sound storyline of an unreal, hallucinatory scenario."
In his radio play Søndergaard works with recordings made in a marble quarry close to the Italian "Marble City" of Carrara. He builds an acoustic bridge between two poles of absolute soundlessness: the stone in its pristine form - heavy, static, mute - and the carved stone, the sculpture, which in turn is surrounded by a dignified silence. Between them stone which is also picked up acoustically: Blasting, the heavy impact of tumbling rocks, cranes which load the piles of rock, noise. Then the noises - in artists' hands - become increasingly finer. Sawing, hammering, sculpting, polishing. Marble - silent matter - made audible in human hands, brought together as a sound image and then falling back to its original silent condition.
The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger does not direct his attention at "Art" but rather at "what-is-there", and above all at how we assimilate or perceive "what-is-there" at all.The programme introduces various works from different creative phases: "Weiss/Weisslich" is a digression on noise, for instance the noise made by different species of tree; the "Quadraturen" is about the transmission of acoustic reality (such as sound recordings of city noise or speech) onto instruments - including a computer-controlled piano. The creative work of one of the great inquiring minds of sound art is situated in this area of tension.Story and directing: Götz Naleppa
Today you will hear a rather unusual form, which can be described as a sound essay or sound philosophy. The Berlin sound engineer and filmmaker Uli Aumüller has done what far too few do: he has been considering the fundamentals of hearing."Even if it sounds almost too banal and simple: A noise is never just simply a noise – a noise is part of a communicative act. Noises only exist in relation to the ear of the listener. Two listeners under the same cherry tree may hear something similar to each other but never exactly the same thing. And if a microphone and speakers are connected into this act of listening, it becomes yet more complicated."Uli Aumüller takes the listener in his acoustic essay on a journey into his personal listeners' life. The road leads through imagined experiences of nature and personal anecdotes and also into philosophical territory.
Isabella Bordoni's artistic work is on the borderline between different disciplines, in the transition from writing to sound, to image, to space. "I'm interested in this technology, which preserves the poetic memory of modern man. I can add something to this, which includes a space of'not knowing' and can view the technical capabilities of the machine as a miracle of nature. In this intersection of different worlds, a new world has been created, a place where all things are at once feeling and logic, poetry and number. Yet this place is also moving (...) and I can only find it, by moving myself. Like an instant and perpetuity it lies in the mystery of the shadow."
Hölderlin spent his last 36 years in a tower room between phases of having presence of mind and "derangement" before he died at the age of 73. Whether he was really insane, is irrelevant for this work. Poetry as song was the mother tongue of the human race for Hölderlin. And he regarded sound as the "truest picture of the pure soul".Ulrich Land is the author and narrator of a libretto of text fragments as well as letters that Hölderlin wrote to his mother from the tower. Rilo Chmielorz and Pedro Lopez have constructed a sound structure around this: an outer tower, which seems to gradually dissolve and transform itself into an inner tower. Holderlin's language is gently and slowly transformed and turned into music.
In 2004, Martin Daske created a 5-minute noise composition every month for Deutschlandradio Kultur, the "Animal of the Month". Each of these compositions only used animal sounds as source material (crocodiles, fish, boars, koalas, frogs, etc.). This material was then partially electronically strongly distorted, made "playable" and interwoven to form multi-layered music. In the hour-long composition "no barking at any time", all of the animal sounds used in 2004 appear once again as a polyphonic body of sound, the white crocodile, the wolf-killing hyena, the savage electric ray, the diabolical koala, the grazing wild sow, the erudite penguin, the howling larva, the contemptuous elephant, the frog's grandson, the albatross, the trotting hippo-not-amus or the bees and bugs.
Canadian electro-acoustics are regarded throughout the world as outstanding. Their origins can be traced back to the 1940s, when Hugh LaCaine developed a forerunner of the modern synthesizer in Ottawa. The studios at the Universities of Toronto and Montreal were established in the 1950s. The scene is alive and creative like hardly any other. There was a big meeting at the ZKM "trans_canada" Festival in Karlsruhe in February 2005.
"Vol d’arondes" by Francis Dhomont, the master of acousmatics, whose "Schwalbenflug" (flight of swallows) achieves extremely poetic effects with playful jauntiness.
A sound artist and a writer dedicate themselves to dance, in order to capture some of its complex aura acoustically. Chantal Dumas accompanied four dancers during rehearsals and at first recorded the clearly physical aspects of dance: Breathing, movement in space, walking, falling, rigidity, and gravity. Into these images she weaves voices which reflect on their own bodies. "Danse" (Dance) is a composition of the elements of body, word and music that oscillates between the presence of the human body and its abstraction in a line, an arc, movement, sound, volume.
For his composition Tetsuo Furudate used a story from the Japanese Noh theatre from the 13th century: On a pilgrimage to the capital of Kyoto, a young monk meets the spirit of a woman at a burial mound who was condemned to hell because she was responsible for the death of two lovers. The noise musician Furudate, using a motif from his own culture for the first time here, found the relentlessness of her conviction by God in the story interesting, and the sharp contrast that is generated musically between the idyllic opening scene and the report from hell. In addition, he was fascinated by the Noh theatre's blurring of the boundaries between life and death, I and you, past and future.
On a 17th January one million years ago, someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. Art was born. At least that is what the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou claimed in 1963. Since then, artists and art lovers around the world have regularly celebrated the birthday of art on 17 January. For this year's "Art's Birthday", the Ars Acustica Group of the European Broadcasting Union networked numerous sound artists and radio stations across the whole continent to celebrate with art its 1,000,042nd year. The radio drama workshop at DeutschlandRadio Berlin congratulated belatedly with a remix of the festivities. For this, Marcus Gammel, along with Lutz Pahl, segmented the sound material into 1,000,042 individual samples. These blocks, or multiples or parts thereof, served as building blocks for the composition. Their arrangement closely follows the concept of "autrisme" (other-ism) that Robert Filliou established in the 60s: "Whatever you're doing, do something else!"
This radio piece is about the four elements, their nature, their outer and inner sound and their archaic power to transform. Since the pre-Socratics, philosophers have dealt with the doctrine of elements, mostly derived from the "One", the primordial matter, which is differentiated into earth, fire, water, air. Their specific composition accounts for the form of all beings and things. Alchemy in particular took to these teachings. On this basis, the composer Thomas Gerwin has tried to establish an "alchemy of sound": His musical elements arise from a primary matter, which differentiates, spreads, and transforms itself. His goal: "To recognise the sublime in the everyday, the practical in principle and the playful in the important."
The composer writes of his new work for Deutschlandradio Kultur: "Many different doors hide many different landscapes. Someone opens and closes them until finally he reaches the labyrinth. A melancholy melody is there – played by the viola – hidden, guarded by a monster. The melody is freed from the labyrinth – but in the meantime everything outside has changed. The real labyrinth is outside…'Labirinti' is a parable about the loss of the centre and of certainty. Everything which appeared to be safe becomes unsafe, things change positions in a kind of surreal journey – a dangerous game in which we may get lost."
Hanna Hartman does not want the title "Wespen Vesper" (Wasps vespers) to be understood as religious, but rather as a language game and festive fantasy.When asked about the content and title of her new work, Hanna Hartman quotes, not coincidentally – the philosopher Roland Barthes: "if we renounce metaphor or symbolism, commentary would become impossible: to speak of the Haiku would be purely and simply to repeat it.".
Entry in the logbook on 5 October 1991. Location: far out in the Adriatic Sea on a sailing boat. Time: 7.30 a.m., in the middle of the Balkan war. A composer and a deserter are steering their boat across the almost motionless sea, when suddenly a little bird, seemingly from nowhere drops out of the sky, settles down next to the sailors and falls asleep. A magic moment – and now there are three on board and all seemingly with the same objective: to escape the war, the borders, the human madness. The passionate sailor and composer Arsenije Jovanovič personally experienced this moment and has kept the memory of it in this sound composition.
With the sound composition "Niemandsbucht" (No man's bay) the composer Thomas Köner follows the trail of a hero. Keuschnig, the protagonist in Peter Handke's 1994 novel "My year in no man's bay", documents the course of a year in a Parisian suburb. Thomas Köner spent more than a year visiting the places whose acoustics Handke describes in detail, looking for sounds that portray "No man's bay" acoustically. Through the musical composition of recordings made at the specific locations, a sound space was created which tells of many places and everyone's "No one's bay".
Engines rattle, pile drivers thunder, electric beepsaccompany mechanic, hydraulic and pneumatic sounds. Karl-Heinz's Mauermann's fragments of text mix themselves into Frank Niehusmann's symphonically compacted sound space. Grim machine haters have their say as do emphatic future optimists. The reports are of loud machinery from an almost bygone age, but also of new and different equipment. All of the sounds are original 20th century. Although some are already extinct, the last generation machines scrapped, the spirits of "our" machines continue to haunt us.
The composition "nota.thión" - the "ideography" - dedicates itself to the experience of disaster and entropy. Norbert Walter Peters lets three voices – an old man, a child, a woman – quote from the epic of Gilgamesh, an anonymous Babylonian poem, which originated around 1800 BC and comments on the Flood. Peters only quotes ancient oriental languages: Akkadian, Old Assyrian, proto-Hattic, Hittite, Hurrian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Hebrew, Arabic. Languages,in which words and what is named are still consonant, attuned with each other. In the composition they are spoken by three voices and, as it were, enter into in a dialogue with the cello.
Canadian electro-acoustics are regarded throughout the world as outstanding. Their origins can be traced back to the 1940s, when Hugh LaCaine developed a forerunner of the modern synthesizer in Ottawa. The studios at the Universities of Toronto and Montreal were established in the 1950s. The scene is alive and creative like hardly any other. There was a big meeting at the ZKM "trans_canada" Festival in Karlsruhe in February 2005.
"Für Dich – For You" by the Vancouver-based sound artist Hildegard Westerkamp, who has worked here with Rilke's "Liebes-Lied" (Love Song).
Canadian electro-acoustics are regarded throughout the world as outstanding. Their origins can be traced back to the 1940s, when Hugh LaCaine developed a forerunner of the modern synthesizer in Ottawa. The studios at the Universities of Toronto and Montreal were established in the 1950s. The scene is alive and creative like hardly any other. There was a big meeting at the ZKM "trans_canada" Festival in Karlsruhe in February 2005.
"Hi Res" by Louis Dufort from Montreal, who is one of the latest generation of "Art Acousmatique" which is seeking its own sound language.A recording from the "trans_canada" festival at the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media Technology.
Prix Phonurgia Nova 2005
„Europas Wahn“ (Europe's Craze) is translating the European continent’s founding myth into the sounds of present-day life. The Rape of Europe – the ancient story of Zeus transforming into a bull in order to capture the Phoenician princess – is retold with the voices of European women who work with bulls: peasants from southern Germany, a French bull breeder, and a German butcher. Their statements are interwoven with the ancient calls and hollers that have always accompanied the encounter of (wo)men and animals. The only male voice of the piece is reciting the myth’s earliest existing version, written by Moschos in the 2nd century BC.
The forbidding barrenness and beauty of Arctic deserts are the starting point for the sound composition "Frost Pattern". Sounds produced only by ice are the focus of an acoustic journey. It leads from Greenland's enormous glaciers to the barely audible tinkling of ice-covered trees in native climes. A permanently frozen world is acoustically described, beneath the surface of which enormous tensile forces are acting. In fascinating original recordings, the action of these forces can be imagined: with glaciers calving, icebergs rolling and bursting and cracks forming in the icy surfaces of frozen lakes. This extremely loud explosive sounds are contrasted with the microscopic sounds made during the formation of frost structures.
Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference.
“As a musician I like to listen to languages whichI do not understand. I like the moment when understanding the words stops and the language becomes 'noise'. All languages have their own special sound”, says Alessandro Bosetti, who has been commissioned to compose twelve noises of the month by Deutschlandradio Kultur for 2006. For “Zwölfzungen” Bosetti collected recordings of eleven languages which he either does not or hardly understands – for example “Zahre” from Friuli, the whistling language of La Gomera, Euskara (Basque), Koiné (Sardinia) or the language of the Dogon in Africa. The twelfth language for the December noise will be an invented language.
Individual titles and broadcasting month of the original series:
- GdM 12/2006: IT-Language
- GdM 11/2006: Claeys
- GdM 10/2006: Oos Kaa Naam
- GdM 09/2006: Restless
- GdM 08/2006: Gigagei Kamama
- GdM 07/2006: Euskara
- GdM 06/2006: Jana
- GdM 05/2006: Advertencia
- GdM 04/2006: chairo - no - kami
- GdM 03/2006: Signora Relax
- GdM 02/2006: Xhosa/Zulu
- GdM 01/2006: Zahre
Frieder Butzmann likes to go to the cemetery. When there he visits the grave of Baron de la Motte-Fouqué, whose novel "The wonderful events befalling the Earl Alethes von Lindenstein" is full of spirits and strange phenomena. Alethes has a lot of adventures with ghosts and tries to solve all of the mysteries, but in doing so conjures up strange new dangers once again. Frieder Butzmann continues this conjuring up of spirits acoustically. Sound was once considered to be disembodied, the first sound transmissions using electromagnetic waves were regarded as materialisations of the invisible. In "Alethes Soundbeams" these techniques are used to make other disembodied entities sound and speak.
"Twice around the World – There and Back Again" is the title of a composition that has emerged from a project for the London experimental station "Resonance FM". Cutler had called for recordings to be made at any point on Earth, in the time window from 23.30 and midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, it is to be noted. Anyone with a microphone and a recorder at hand could participate, but had to take the respective time difference into consideration. 247 entries reached Cutler, who presented them unedited in his programme "Out Of The Blue Radio". Between summer 2002 and summer 2003, London listeners could listen to a different place in the world between half twelve and midnight every day.Chris Cutler has already released a remix of this acoustic world tour for ORF Kunstradio. Chris Cutler has now put together a new 50-minute remix for Deutschlandradio Kultur. He did not base his selection on the quality of the individual recordings, but rather on the geographic origin. The sequence of sounds takes us twice around the Earth and back again. On the outward journey, all the stations are strung together systematically. On the way back however, Cutler works with overlaps and displacements, as they arise in memory when recalling a long journey.
China - that is a sunset on the shore of a lake,a group of pensioners practising Tai Chi, the rhythmic brushing of cotton, and finally Chinese hip-hop music from a car radio and the underground announcements in Beijing. Stephen Erickson travelled through China and found himself facing a overcrowded, complex Chinese painting in which the past, present and the future, religion, and ideology are united.His soundscape "Dancing River - Crying Dragon" captures many of the details of contemporary China, connects these sounds with classical Chinese music, and tells the story of more than 5000 years of Chinese history.
On 17 January, the Ars Acustica group of the European Broadcasting Union celebrated the 1,000,043rd Art's Birthday, the birthday of art, and simultaneously the 90th anniversary of Dadaism. Large numbers of sound artists and radio stations networked via satellite for an international birthday party under the motto TransDADA Express. The sound art department of Deutschlandradio Kultur congratulated with a live event from the TESLA in Berlin. Tetsuo Furudate and Georg Klein were commissioned to deal in their own way with the legacy of Dadaism: DADAyama.Marcus Gammel presents the highlights of the live concert from 17 January 2006 in this summary.
"In times of surging hysteria, we must stand united and make sacrifices for our economy. In times of linguistic and climatic madness we have to make an extra effort in order to be the first.'Wir müssen siegen' (We must conquer) is the formal conversion of a composed radiophonic sequence into a sound mix.The cast: percussion, piano, sounds captured from the media and from the street; the Rupert Huber sound archive; the electronic manipulation of all these sounds.The piece is initially determined by alternating content and tips ever more into polyphonic simultaneity. Like in a washing machine in its spin cycle, towards the end of the piece all the notes, noises, rhythms, words and sounds are all whirled around together." (Rupert Huber)
"2nd 49" is a speech-sound composition, in which Kazuya Ishigami comes to grips with a very personal experience – the death of his father. 14 years would pass before he could listen to his father's voice on tape without difficulty and could create a composition with it. The Buddhist "Tibetan Book of the Dead" teaches that the transition between death and rebirth takes 49 days. Ishigami reconstructs this cycle of 7 x 7 days once again to music: His composition is as a result structured by the number 49. 49 music tracks of sounds and voices – prayers and original sound recordings on tape – are consistently divided into time periods lasting 0.49 secs., 4.9 secs., 49 secs., and 49.49 minutes. A performance in thoughts of a man on his way from his past life into his new life.
The composition is based on Shakespeare's "Tempest" – however not on the text and the story, but the stage directions, which evoke music and sound, and especially on the numerous passages where people describe sounds that they hear: "out of the air – from somewhere". Jovanovič regards this information and passages from Shakespeare's text as a score for an independent composition, the sorcerer Prospero making the sounds which are inaudible in Shakespeare audible to us on his sound archipelago.
"Consolamini (St. Paul, the Apostle: 'Comfort ye one another with these words'!) is a work about death. My first compositional concern was 'time'. Consolamini does not only move in sound and the language itself, but essentially in the time proportions, in the gap, into which the symbolic yet extends ... If there is mention of death in Consolamini, I could nothing but perceive the earthquake, which is pushing over from the last century, muffled and inevitable, so that death cannot be discussed without speaking of the concept of 'destruction' " (Christoph Korn)
On a trip through Vietnam, Marcus Mohr collected the source material for his sound piece "muoi (zehn)", which is based on the concept of the five elements: metal, earth, wood, water, fire. Marcus Mohr assigns each of his recordings to one of the five elements and treats them in the same the way a DJ plays his records: from the sounds of an element, he generates a track and then combines this with the tracks of the other elements. Gradually more and more elements are added, at first running synchronously, then offset, and finally alternating. Ten different combinations are created in this way, in which each element is mixed with one of the other four elements. "Muoi (zehn)" tells of the balance and interplay between the five elements.
"Little Connections" is based on the text "Lifting Belly" (1915-17) by Gertrude Stein. She dedicated the erotic poem to her great love Alice B. Toklas. "Lifting Belly" is light and rhythmic love talk, a many-voiced dialogue and statement – the entire cosmos in a Stein manner, linking the private and public together. - The composition "Little Connections" takes the tonal connections of the text as its own. Two voices dance together, come close to each other, get muddled, interrupt and attack each other. The space opens itself for the intimacy between two people.
After the plants and the animals, the first humans were made out of clay. But they were too soft and dissolved. The second humans were made out of wood. But they forgot to honour their creator and were destroyed again. The third humans were made entirely from corn, they thanked their creators and founded families and nations... So it is told in the Popol Vuh, the unique Maya book of creation, which was passed on to a missionary in the 16th century in the Mayan language "so that the lore of our people will survive". Götz Naleppa has created a sound composition combining German and Mayan text, jungle sounds from Mayan temple sites and music played on pre-Hispanic instruments, in which the cruel and cosmic-comic aspects of creation become tangible.
After the plants and the animals, the first humans were made out of clay. But they were too soft and dissolved. The second humans were made out of wood. But they forgot to honour their creator and were destroyed again. The third humans were made entirely from corn, they thanked their creators and founded families and nations... So it is told in the Popol Vuh, the unique Maya book of creation, which was passed on to a missionary in the 16th century in the Mayan language "so that the lore of our people will survive". Götz Naleppa has created a sound composition combining German and Mayan text, jungle sounds from Mayan temple sites and music played on pre-Hispanic instruments, in which the cruel and cosmic-comic aspects of creation become tangible.
For her composition "Studio in forma di rosa" Lucia Ronchetti has thought of a picture: the complex spiral shape of a rose. The inside of the closed young rose inspired her to a special compositional structure: she combines Italian vocal music from the 13th and 14th century with a mansur ney flute in the Sufi tradition and takes these motifs through cyclic variations. The sounds develop themselves in a spiral motion and thus reproduce the process of blooming musically. "Night, secret, dark, blood, invisible" are some of the words which different voices in Spanish, Turkish, Italian and Persian speak aloud and accumulate in their spiral motion into the shape of a rose. "The landscape around the single rose can be the darkness, as a still life on a black background." (Lucia Ronchetti).
Stereophonic radio piece over a text by Andrea Fortina (2006)
"A field, a meadow, wind, a distant car, bird calls. Waiting. An unusual event, a brief fluttering to the right of the electric pylons. Grabbing the binoculars. The jacket rustles – much too loud... Now hold that view, and slide the eyepiece into your field of vision: There he is. He's looking right in your direction, as if your eyes would meet. A sudden movement, your lose your point of focus. A brief feeling of dizziness. He's gone."
Philip Scheffner has been watching birds since he was eight. In recent years, he has increasingly exchanged his binoculars for a microphone and observes: "If you try to avoid making noises, the relationship between foreground and background blurs. A rustling jacket is perceived as a little hurricane, a small click becomes a sound event. "
John Cage set a milestone of modern music history in 1958 with "Fontana Mix". For the first time a composer was not writing directly for musicians, but in the first instance for other composers. Cage's graphic guidelines first have to be musically worked out before they can actually be heard.Volker Straebel created a realisation of the "Fontana Mix" for his new version of Cage's "Europeras" at Aachen Theatre in 2006. In addition to Cage's own audio tape realisation, he primarily used sounds which he found at his workplace: sounds of the city of Aachen and the surrounding area, recordings from rehearsals in the theatre, from the workshops, the public foyers and so on.He processed these sounds, 1181 in number, on the basis of Cage's score to create a separate audio tape composition.
With his "Book of Imaginary Beings", Jorge Luis Borges created a handbook of the zoological mythical creatures, which have stirred the imagination of people of all ages: from the Dragon and the Unicorn, from the Sphinx, Salamander and Shadow Eater to the Squonk and the Phoenix, everything that can be dreamed of is there. Such a "bestiary" provides us with descriptions and pictures of these mythical beasts.But what do they SOUND like?This is the starting point for Mario Verandi's work, which, with the help of the Stuttgart New Vocal Soloists, makes the transformed sounds of the imaginary beings audible. "A humble tribute to the imagination of my great countryman Borges" (Mario Verandi).
Point
of departure for this sailboat trip is Opus 72 by Franz Schubert. By the use of
analog and digital electronics we sail
on a sea of fantasy and distance ourselves step by step from the
original. The landing is uncertain..
Speaker: David Johnson
Text: Friedrich Leopold, Count of Stolberg-Stolberg
Engines rattle, pile drivers thunder, electric beepsaccompany mechanic, hydraulic and pneumatic sounds. Karl-Heinz's Mauermann's fragments of text mix themselves into Frank Niehusmann's symphonically compacted sound space. Grim machine haters have their say as do emphatic future optimists. The reports are of loud machinery from an almost bygone age, but also of new and different equipment. All of the sounds are original 20th century. Although some are already extinct, the last generation machines scrapped, the spirits of "our" machines continue to haunt us.
Fragments of classical music are not always the point of departure of a composition. In "Some funny stuff" I blend a Bouzouki melodic fragment together with sentences from a pocket novel. Together they sound like a "yearning loop".
"The two related sound compositions fire pattern and frost pattern listen to the sounds of fire and ice, and, through their identical structure, emphasize the acoustic relationship between the two temperature poles. Fire pattern deals with the sound phenomena that occur during combustion processes and high temperatures. Centre stage is given to sound recordings of volcanoes and geysers from Vanuatu, Costa Rica, Iceland and Sicily. Besides this, the prolonged tones of the singing flames and a spectrum of the quietest heat and fire noises, recall the role of fire as man's constant companion throughout the course of civilization." (Bick)
The story of the German scientist Ludwig Leichhardt, who disappeared on his third expedition in the Australian bush in 1848, becomes allegorical for Colin Black. The Australian composer takes it as an example of the European conqueror who, in an osmotic process, is defeated by the landscape and eventually devoured. Text, sound and music are equally important in this sound composition and respond to each other like echoes in this soundscape. Black also uses his "extended enviro guitar" with additional three to 15 metre long strings attached to the landscape and which is played by the wind or the rain.
For this project, Bosetti "translates" madrigals by his compatriot, the brilliant composer and murderer of his wife, Prince Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) into the diversity of voices from the underground in present-day Naples. "Gesualdo's vocal music is courtly, aristocratic and abstract. Naples' voices are extreme, loud and theatrical. Naples is aristocratic and degenerate. Gesualdo and Naples are very emotional beings. Gesualdo killed his wife. Naples is killing its children. Gesualdo's emotion is burning and cold – pale blue and green. Naples' emotion is burning and hot like the inside of its volcano – red velvet. (Bosetti)
"Die Zeit weht" (Time is drifting) is a radio play about clouds – about the formless, void, variable and bottomless symbolic of these celestial phenomena, composed from the waving sound images of two hybrid instruments: Werner Cee's E-Chin and Eivind Aarset's electric guitar."Ränder der Musik" (The margins of music) is a radio play about the poetry of the unwanted, the useless, the not-thought out and the not-done. It is made up of the sounds of musicians before and after making music. A composition that shows sounds as they are: seemingly random, effortless.Both pieces enter into a sound-poetic dialogue on the margins between form and dissolution and on the continuous change in the course of time.
"The ancient Romans are my neighbours in Rome. ON THE ROADS (with a wink to Jack Kerouac) is my impossible attempt to capture the illusory presence of ancient Rome. The remains of the old Roman roads are a type of 'score' with everything that goes, rolls or is dragged over these stones. Not far from my house is the Via Appia, and I have started to record horses, tourists, birds, dogs, archaeologists as well as my own instruments, in open countryside, bordered by time-worn tombs and the ruins of ancient country houses. A number of Latin texts greet the travellers, as do ram horns, lyres and zithers, drums and perhaps the sounds of elephants and lions, who were paraded through these streets. This ancient concoction of sounds is transposed into a contemporary language." (A. Curran)
He wanted to create an archive for all the music in the world: In 1900, the musicologist and ethnologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel started to collect the sounds of foreign peoples - from Tierra del Fuego to Japan, from Alaska to Australia. A new technology had made his dream possible: With the help of the Edison phonograph, researchers, commercial travellers, missionaries and diplomats could record everything which reached their ears when they were far away. Over time, 16,000 recordings arrived in Berlin, before being catalogued, transcribed and analysed. Following an adventurous odyssey during the Cold War, the collection has been accessible again since 1990. Xavier Fassion and Marcus Gammel compose a journey through sound and time from the wax cylinders of the Berlin Phonogram Archive.
"Die große Stille" (Into Great Silence) is a film about "La Grande Chartreuse", the head monastery of the legendary silent order of Carthusian monks. 19 years after the first meeting between the director Philip Gröning and the prior of the monastery, he created the first film that was ever permitted to be made about life behind the monastery walls. A strict, almost silent meditation on monastic life in its purest form. No music, no interviews, no comments, no additional material. Only the passage of time, the change of seasons and the recurring element of the day: prayer. In this wordless silence every noise is significant. That is why the director has made a radio version of the soundtrack on behalf of Deutschlandradio: Listening to silence.
"Paris, 50 125 before Christ. In a café, a couple of Neanderthals are chatting with some representatives of the species Homo sapiens. Suddenly, the waiter reveals himself to be a not quite extinct Australopithecus and blows himself up. The tremendous explosion opens the door to an imaginary landscape of atoms and elementary particles. The clock is put back 14 billion years, to the time of the Big Bang." "Geologica" transposes the different periods of the Earth's history into a playful and ironic sound composition. Quite incidentally, the piece reflects on the smallness of man in the face of the gigantic expansion of the universe.
Drehungen und Windungen (CD1, Track 1) – 00:06:44
Segeln mit Schubert (CD1, Track 2) – 00:04:21
Die Kammer des Kranken (CD1, Track 3) – 00:08:52
Corpo libero (CD2, Track 2) – 00:09:41
Body in Music (CD2, Track 3) – 00:11:04
Le bonheur / Glück – 00:07:44
The Swiss composer Bernadette Johnson is a master of the small form which she calls "acoustic poetry", associative sound structures of noises, instrumental sounds and language elements. The goal is to create certain volatile moods with minimal resources. She herself says: "In my acoustic works, I am interested in finding other layers of reality, the imaginary, the ambivalence of a mood. When everyday things are surprisingly linked together, something mysterious is discernible for a few moments."
„Seit einiger Zeit fasziniert mich die Auseinandersetzung mit verschiedenen Aspekten von Urbanität“, schreibt der Medienkünstler Thomas Köner. In „Niemandsbucht“ hat er sich mit den Klangwelten der Pariser Vorstädte auseinandergesetzt, in „Banlieue du Vide“ observierte er über das Internet schneebedeckte Straßenzüge auf der ganzen Welt. Für „Terrain Vague“ hat er sich nun nach Belgrad begeben.Um die Metropole des zerfallenen Jugoslawien musikalisch erfahrbar zu machen, entwickelt er eine „klangliche Röntgenstrahlung, die Klanggebärden des Belgrader Alltags gleichsam durchdringt und den Hörer sonare Nachbilder und Geräuschresiduen als eine im Dunkel leuchtende Klangsprache erkennen lässt.“
This sound poem is the result of a more than one-year collaboration between the German sound artist W. P. Menzel and the Norwegian composer Ola Eseth Moen. "My Father, the Sea" has a personal background for Menzel: his father found his watery grave in the spring of 1945 as a sailor on board a German U-boat which was sunk by Allied warships. But over and above the biographical, the steel body of the U-boat becomes a sound metaphor for the existential loneliness of the person trapped in the ocean and for our fragile existence today.
In the spring of 2003, the composer John Palmer discovered a temple dug into the rock at the foot of the Alps. This experience reminded him of the first words from Dante's Divine Comedy: "When I had journeyed half of our life's way/I found myself within a shadowed forest,/for I had lost the path that does not stray."Palmer spent a year researching these unusual spaces. His composition follows the colours, lighting conditions and sounds of the temple, it transforms the temple's architecture, symbolism and acoustics into music. "A journey through mystical worlds of knowledge, a path to a lost holy heritage." (Palmer)
"This work is a musical portrait of Rome through the sound of its old doors. Their sound gives a shadowy report of the lives once lived behind them. I have tried to listen to each door in order to describe the complexity of this noisy city with its overlapping centuries of sound. The opening of each individual door involves music, shouts or dialogue. Not unlike Ariosto's 'Castello di Atlante' (Atlas' Castle), to which all those are drawn who are seeking a loved one, I have tried to capture the life on the other side of the door by mixing a sound spectacle of personal memories and realistic projections." (Lucia Ronchetti)
Recordings of Snow Music are rare, and even more rarely are they presented to a greater public. The Hamburg artist Gabi Schaffner and the Finnish music anthropologist Sisukas Poronainen spent three years collecting material in Finland and Lapland. In our programme Gabi Schaffner presents some of their finest examples of Finnish "Lumimusikki": Field recordings from North Karelia and Lapland are mixed with modern pieces from Helsinki, Turku and Tampere. For a new generation of musicians has committed itself to the task of reinterpreting the older traditions of ritual tunes and word magic. The impact of Snow Music has grown with the increasing need for a musical identity incorporating the poetic universe of snow.
"Jacob Räume Zen" (Jacob Spaces Zen) combines the texts and visionary pictures from Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) with the experience and statements of Zen Buddhism. Johannes S. Sistermanns uses the spiritual closeness of these geographically distant worlds to bring the respective sound spaces in contact with each other. Boehme's texts are transferred from his home town of Görlitz into Japanese everyday places and monastery rooms. Words from the Zen monks journey acoustically from Japan into the living spaces occupied by Jacob Boehme. In the course of the piece, the sounds gradually interweave with each other. They create an atmosphere of non-conceptual recognition, into which Boehme's experiences are silently absorbed.
"This composition is the musical version of the television tower at Alexanderplatz from the perspective of a mushroom lover from Switzerland. Three narrative strands are spliced together in a stereo image. (...) A stuttering revue, a faltering ballet, a suffering illustrated broadsheet of voices and scraps of action. One hour of music: crazy, imaginative, informative, entertaining, magical, enchanted, and above all surprising. The piece should sing and be silent, create moods, bring back memories, make us prick up our ears – and remain mysterious." (Michael Wertmuller)
This acoustical poem confronts us with the fragility and mortality of the body,
with the subtle signs which it radiates, as
well as with hidden beauties, which appear unexpectedly.
Audio point of departure is the Theme of the E-flat major Variations by Robert
Schumann. The singer heard the melody through headphones and improvised
upon it.
Speaker: David Johnson
Singing voice: Carla Johnson
In the art carousel of the 80s, Martin Kippenberger's bizarre performances were the cream of the crop within the scene. The nights were his, and he was inexhaustible on his journey as an impresario, dancer and entertainer. There was silence and solitude in front of the screen. "Aufstehn / Stuhl kaputt machen / you / yellow / you" (Martin Kippenberger).The radio play collages texts, poems, music and original recordings of Kippenberger with music by Augst, Carl and Johansson.
"A radio play that tells of the sounding world of my childhood in Upper Austria, how sounds led me through the day, accompanied my waking and made me happy or afraid. At that time the sound of the bells of the St. Florian collegiate church still organized the social life of the farming community; the seasons, the holidays, the people and the work on the farm each had a different sound. For this piece I am remembering that time and tracing the sounds of a vanished world, seeking and inventing what has been lost." (Sam Auinger)
During the last ten years I occasionally recorded at subwaytrains and stations in various places, but in A Narrow Angle: Taipei Metro Easycard 500 NT$ I focused on a very particular aspect encountered in the Taipei Metro (hence ‘narrow angle’). This piece is the second of three parts: part one focuses on recordings from crowded urban game parlours; part three on recordings from around a Taoist temple at the edge of the forest north of Taipei.
"A Narrow Angle" was also published on CD: Entr'acte (http://www.entracte.co.uk).
The composition "Sleppet" was developed as part of the eponymous sound art project, in which six leading international sound artists recorded sounds during a ten-day tour of the Vestlandet region of Norway, and used the experiences of nature as inspiration for a series of sound installations and pieces of music. "Sleppet" refers to the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, for whom the influence of nature observation on artistic creation was of great importance.The composition has four movements: 1) Seagulls and cattle 2) Avalanches, Water and Stones 3) Glacier 4) Sheep and Industry.
"Sleppet" has also been published on CD: Crónica (http://www.cronicaelectronica.org).
"What does that mean? It's hard to say because I am always an observer, collecting information, and in this way creating a story in which I only recognise that which I consider to be possible … Physical reality is an illusion of our senses … ." (Beumer) The meeting, overlapping and the interfaces between perception, subject and sensation, between reality and its disintegration, between electronic, artificial sounds and the sound variations that are generated in the human vocal apparatus form the basis of this composition for Electronic Sounds, Digital Piano, Noise and Voice Art.
"'Hudson Street' came into being in 2005 / 2006 between New York and Nancy. At first I had no other interest than simply to record the sounds of New York by systematically walking from street to street. Later I naively searched for the music in the sounds and composed a musical fiction – something between folk, rock and noise music. 'Hudson Street' is the starting point for an even longer as yet unfinished piece on the memory of sound." (Hervé Birolini")
"The material from 'Silent cellulo' (Mute Celluloid) comes from 35mm cinema projectors. The mechanical noises of optical projectors enter into a dialogue with instruments as acoustic projectors. Added to this is the piano, as an instrument which has accompanied the cinema since the era of silent film, the saxophone, which breathes life into the imaginary and finally a voice, which crosses the mechanical landscapes of the piece. 'Silent cellulo' is an attempt to visit the cinema from a sound perspective, an attempt for those who can hear pictures." (Birolini)
The Hardangervidda in southern Norway is a rugged plateau, which was eroded by glaciers. Here is where the early polar explorers trained for their expeditions; here was where water power first made possible the production of heavy water, needed for making atomic bombs. A power plant built by Norwegian scientists in Rjukan was hard-fought over during the Second World War and destroyed.Werner Cee uses this tension between elemental nature and short-lived human intervention for an acoustic land art project. The Norwegian percussionist Terje Isungset places artificial sounds in the landscape, plays materials found there, communicates with the existing soundscape.
"Childhood as a black mirror, from which appear dreamlike beings from a hidden life, visionary beings, called the 'bad children' because they see what no one else can see. They make life hell, because they foresee everything and forget nothing. The composition is structured as a suite. In each movement the children's voices tell different stories in a cryptic, yet understandable language. Black theatre, in which the scenery comes and goes and sounds and voices appear as visions from the dark." (Sheila Concari).
The sound material for this composition are underwater recordings from the sea, lakes and rivers, which the authors see as "resonating collectors of dreams and memories". "Bodies of water form a luminous boundary between the human and the non-human, between different scales of time, and of being".
The piece combines electroacoustically transformed sounds with multilingual text fragments such as the inner monologues of a murdered revolutionary, a young swimmer and an unborn child.
"that world is the other the other night the one we never pass the one underwater"
"A bright morning. While I am having breakfast, I sense something behind my back which drives me crazy. It seems as if there is a locked room on the rear side of the wall behind me. As if there was a pitch-black room there that the morning sun does not reach. There, a father is devouring his son." The Japanese noise artist Tetsuo Furudate translates Francisco de Goya's black paintings into an oppressive sound collage of linguistic and musical visions of horror.
She is 1,000,045 years old, and yet is reborn every day: Art has always lived on the tension existing between tradition and freshness. No one knew this better than the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, who declared 17th January 1963 to be the 1000000th birthday of art. Following this, the art world has celebrated the planet's oldest child every year.For Art's Birthday in 2008, the Ars Acustica Group of the European Broadcasting Union proclaimed the motto "Forever Young". Many radio broadcasters across Europe dedicate their birthday celebrations to the interaction of sound art and pop culture. Deutschlandradio Kultur confronts a veteran of the German underground with a central formation from the modern electronic scene: The percussionist Endruh Unruh from the Einstürzende Neubauten, the group Rechenzentrum and the composer Frieder Butzmann together explore pop as the eternal fountain of youth for sound art.
Art's Birthday 2008: Forever youngOrganized by the art of sound art department of Deutschlandradio Kultur with Radialsystem and the 2008 Ultraschall-Festival
"A forest in Bali at dusk: Thousands of rhythmically chirping crickets create a magical harmony... A village in eastern Senegal at dawn: women's voices whispering, water splashing, a child crying, every so often the sound of a wooden pestle pounding the millet ... Santiago de Cuba at midnight: Tens of thousands of fans in the street celebrating the baseball victory over arch-rivals Havana ... Sounds, like I have recorded them in various places around the world. My composition for an ensemble of selected musicians sends us on a journey, makes distance and convergences audible, traces the acoustic secrets of past sound experiences." (Wolfgang Hamm)
"Whisper of Sound God"
"I believe that every one of us has heard the whisper of the "Sound God"in our childhood. But we have all forgotten it. We can hear the whisper of God's sound (in Japanese 'oto kamui') when we become pure of spirit again."
Disc 1 – track 1 –"Oto kamui no sasayaki" , "Harmony is the Best Way"
"The Old Japanese Prince Shotoku Taishi said that 'harmony is the best way'. So we need "wa" – harmony – for the people. This is easy to say but difficult to do. I have always liked creating harmonious sounds. However not harmonies in the musical sense, but in the spiritual sense. In this work I have tried to create "wa" sounds from sound material I recorded in a Japanese Shinto temple."
Disc 1 – track 2 – "Wa wo motte toutoshi to nasu", "mujo no kaze – mutable wind"
"This song is for my Aunt Michiko. She died in the earthquake in Kobe in 1995. The piano melody was generated by the "MICHIKO" parameter.
Disc 2 – track 3 – "mujo no kaze – mutable wind"
The sound material for this composition are recordings by the two composers of two extended trips to India. Without passing judgement, they examine the different qualities of acoustic energy and the broad dynamic range in large cities, in bazaars or livestock markets: It is an exuberant noise, which allows the old town streets of Delhi to sink in a gigantic noise concert before sunset; at night there is a ghostly stillness at the same place. It does not have to do with a realistic picture of the places, but rather with the dynamic and tonal richness: a complex blend of spices - "spicy"!
"The Aboriginals believe that an unsung land is a dead land, for when the songs fall into oblivion, the land itself dies."
Bruce Chatwin's bestseller "Songlines" made the musical culture of the Aboriginal world-famous. The Canadian sound artist Robin Minard now approaches this unique connection between music, landscape and everyday life with the microphone. Field recordings, interviews, songs, history and archival recordings are woven together into many-layered narrative levels. Minard's radio composition uses the resources of modern sound processing to sing the interpenetration of culture and nature.
"Following hours of silence in nature, I came to know a kind of listening, in which all sounds merge into a single noise. I also listen for this noise in the city, in a park, in my backyard."With"Nektarrauschen" (nectar noise), the composer Jürgen Seizew has added an inner level to these soundscapes. He calls the result "Stratascapes"."Stratascapes are sounds which are exclusively developed through the cutting and mixing (in part billionfold stratifications) of noises or series of field recordings. Accents from the original soundscapes play a narrative role in the piece. Conversely the Stratasounds describe an inaudible level of the soundscapes." (Jürgen Seizew)
Two poems by the futuristic Russian poet Chlebnikov (1885-1922) – written in a psychiatric hospital – gave the impetus for this "musical radio piece for sound singers, sound speakers and other sound sources". For Chlebnikov, who worked on translating the language of birds, spirits and gods, language was material for games and sounds, a fantastic grab bag of freely selectable phonemes. The radio piece is a continuation of Khlebnikov's principle with digital means.
Götz Naleppa, founder and long standing director of Deutschlandradio's sound art slot, reitred in 2008. For his farewell, he received sonic presents from all over the world.
With contributions by Andreas Bick, Hervé Birolini, Colin Black, Alessandro Bosetti, Frieder Butzmann, Christian Calon, Rilo Chmielorz, Francis Dhomont, Thomas Doktor, Chantal Dumas, Stephan Froleyks, Stefano Giannotti, Heiner Grenzland, Hanna Hartman, Ricardo Haye, José Iges, Arsenije Jovanovic, Kaye Mortley, Georg Klein / Steffi Weißmann, Felix Kubin, Wolfgang Peter Menzel, Cathy Miliken, Kaye Mortley, Norbert Walter Peters, Proton Sonic Arts Group, Lucia Ronchetti / Thomas Seelig, Sabine Schäfer / Joachim Krebs, Mario Verandi.
The Yaghan were nomads of the seas. They navigated their canoes between the islands around Cape Horn and lived by hunting sea lions. Their language was closely connected with nature. It is considered the most concise idiom in the world. "Hamoni lapude anan" means something like: "In the past I also used to build canoes - today I don't do that any longer."
Joaquin Cofreces visited the last two Yaghan spokeswomen. With the help of anthropologists he reconstructs the everyday sounds of the Yaghan. And he wanders through their natural habitats with his microphone.
Today Tierra del Fuego is characterized by immigrants of many different origins. Cofreces creates an acoustic meditation on old and new nomads at the southernmost tip of the world.
"The two related sound compositions fire pattern and frost pattern listen to the sounds of fire and ice, and, through their identical structure, emphasize the acoustic relationship between the two temperature poles. Fire pattern deals with the sound phenomena that occur during combustion processes and high temperatures. Centre stage is given to sound recordings of volcanoes and geysers from Vanuatu, Costa Rica, Iceland and Sicily. Besides this, the prolonged tones of the singing flames and a spectrum of the quietest heat and fire noises, recall the role of fire as man's constant companion throughout the course of civilization." (Bick)
The forbidding barrenness and beauty of Arctic deserts are the starting point for the sound composition "Frost Pattern". Sounds produced only by ice are the focus of an acoustic journey. It leads from Greenland's enormous glaciers to the barely audible tinkling of ice-covered trees in native climes. A permanently frozen world is acoustically described, beneath the surface of which enormous tensile forces are acting. In fascinating original recordings, the action of these forces can be imagined: with glaciers calving, icebergs rolling and bursting and cracks forming in the icy surfaces of frozen lakes. This extremely loud explosive sounds are contrasted with the microscopic sounds made during the formation of frost structures.
An homage to summer. Sound pictures of intense moments, elusive moods.
Familiar sounds introduce a summer day, but are soon covered and colored by
strange ones.
"Good evening ... we're playing 'Telephone' on air." These words opened a four-hour broadcast on Deutschlandradio Kultur's medium and long wave frequencies on 21 March 2009. On the World Day of Poetry the sound artist Alessandro Bosetti transformed the medium of radio into a gigantic sound poetry generator. Broadcast messages on the edge of intelligibility were received by listeners around the world, transcribed, and returned to the radio station from where they were broadcast once again until this became an abstract, musical, mysterious and humorous sound composition.Arcoparlante is a "speaking arc". An international electromagnetic festival of language games, absurdities, creative transmission errors.
"The Klingons are belligerent and stubborn. They are known as a warlike people from the planet Qo'noS from the TV series Star Trek. But the Klingons also love music and poetry. Their greatest poet was Shakespeare from Earth, who was allegedly one of their own.The Klingon opera "juHrop" (pronounced tschuch-rop, in German: homesickness) plays timpani and trumpets without restraint in a heroic monumental orchestra, which is supplemented by synthetic Gregorian and electronic hi-fi and lo-fi effects. The story is as bloodthirsty and heart-rending as is its setting to music. The singing is in Klingon and Chinese." (Frieder Butzmann)
The original meaning of the labyrinth is as a sign of change and transformation. Only he who turns back too soon can get lost there. Some 3000 year-old Cretan coins exhibit perfectly planned figures with only a single path to the centre. The Hopi Indians refer to the labyrinth as the cradle of life and speak of a thread that is never interrupted. Mythologists even see in dance the origin of the intricate paths, which are there to transfer spatial patterns into choreographed movement.Rilo Chmielorz and Pedro López track the renewing aspect of the labyrinth in a "performative field test". A fictitious person moves through a sound space that makes it possible to experience acoustically the risk of change and the ambivalence of life.
The living room is a special room. Nowhere else is the private and intimate as strongly intermingled with the public and universal. That's good to hear: From chamber music to radio reception, living room sounds constantly reflect the tension between the internal and the external world.For his composition "Living Room Music", Alvin Curran invites a number of musician and artist friends over to play in his living room in Rome. Built on the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, with a view of the Colosseum, filled with musical instruments, sheet music, books and objects from around the world, this place becomes a resonance space for meetings, conversations and musical improvisations.Curran processed this material into a radiophonic room composition. "I want the sound of my living room to be the sum of all of the sounds that can ever be heard in this room." (Curran)
"What is your favourite sound in Prague? And why?" Between March and October 2008 this question was answered by citizens of the Czech capital, from all age groups and classes.Miloš Vojtěchovský and Peter Cusack interviewed suburbanites and city dwellers, schoolchildren and students, children and elderly people, blind and sighted people, workers and politicians. From sounds and interviews arose a polyphonic sound topography of Prague life. The piece was created as part of "Zipp - German-Czech Cultural Projects", an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
Safety sounds. Like lullabies, familiar voices, the ticking of an old pendulum clock. Insecurity is transmitted by sirens, bells, shouts, claps of thunder. "Sound" in English does not only mean "sound" as in noise, but also "well-built and in good condition". The connection between acoustics and human well-being could hardly be deeper and more complex.For the 1,000,046th birthday of art, the Ars Acustica group of the EBU, as every year, is organising a European-wide sound art event. On Art's Birthday 2009, artists from Madrid to Moscow are going to 'make the airwaves unsafe' via satellite, antenna and cable. Real and unreal threats, genuine and illusory home ports, ivory towers and underground guerrillas penetrate their way through to a disorienting sound art night.
"I like a quotation from Don DeLillo, which goes something like: 'It takes centuries to invent the primitive' (Americana). So I decided to build a whole series of primitive worlds through a long design process. Imaginary landscapes, which portrait cryptic inner worlds, autobiographical and universal at the same time. In-depth research into musical instruments and everyday objects. Archives of memory. Advanced instrumental techniques. Sonic pages." (Stefano Giannotti)
The Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard explores resonances and reflections of empty spaces. He was inspired by the acoustic research carried out by Athanasius Kircher, as well as by Alvin Lucier's epoch-making experiment "I am sitting in a room".His new work, "Speculum Speculi" is an experiment that operates at the very core of radio broadcasting: Working with precision-ground magnifiers and mirrors, through amplification and feedback processes he eavesdrops on the empty production studios at the Deutschlandradio Kultur broadcasting station. The hidden breath of the "anechoic" spaces meets with the sound of the desert: "Singende Dünen" (Singing Dunes) from Oman counterpoint the sounds of the broadcast studios. An acoustic dialogue out of nothing.
"Sonic X-radiation" is how Thomas Köner refers to the instruments with which he tirelessly shines through the stone shells covering modern cities. He has composed a "sound letter" from a different global metropolis every month since January 2008 for Deutschlandradio Kultur. These five-minute miniatures can be heard regularly as the "Sound of the Month" in the radio drama and feature programme. As opposed to simple "Cityscapes", Köner's compositions penetrate deep below the surface of tonal and social daily life. They expose sounding archetypes, which are localized and placeless, primitive and highly modern at the same time. In "Lithosphères" (Lithospheres) the media artist combines the horizontal movement from time to time, from city to city with a vertical drift through the sound sediments of urban life.
"Sonic X-radiation" is how Thomas Köner refers to the instruments with which he tirelessly shines through the stone shells covering modern cities. He has composed a "sound letter" from a different global metropolis every month since January 2008 for Deutschlandradio Kultur. These five-minute miniatures can be heard regularly as the "Sound of the Month" in the radio drama and feature programme. As opposed to simple "Cityscapes", Köner's compositions penetrate deep below the surface of tonal and social daily life. They expose sounding archetypes, which are localized and placeless, primitive and highly modern at the same time. In "Lithosphères" (Lithospheres) the media artist combines the horizontal movement from time to time, from city to city with a vertical drift through the sound sediments of urban life.
On 16 January 2009 the radio artist Brandon LaBelle and the electronic musician Benny Nilsen constructed a radiophonic experimental set-up comprising music, electromagnetic waves and human bodies: In the "Maria am Ostbahnhof" club in Berlin they staged a silent disco where the dance music was heard only through wireless headphones. They had previously located a series of microphones The dance floor of the club, so that the sounds of the dancing bodies could be recorded, processed and fed back into the room. From the resulting material, LaBelle and Nilsen have created a radiophonic 'Performance Lecture' on virtual sounds and physical control.
On an extended trip, Eva Pöpplein and Janko Hanushevsky followed the lower reaches of the Mekong River through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam down to the delta where the river empties into the South China Sea.
The Duo Merzouga counterpoint the acoustic landscapes of this enormous water world with electronically processed electric bass sounds.
"You can hear the trickle of the pebbles in the riverbed, the peaceful chugging of an outboard motor and the occasional call of a water bird, while the trickle slowly changes colour, the cool, small-scale clicking of the pebbles accelerates into the unreal, the diesel engine suddenly develops a droning sound"
"Paso Doble" is the meeting of two artists and two media based with the aid of one and the same material: The Catalan sculptor Miquel Barcelò and the Hungarian dancer/choreographer Josef Nadj handle, record, orchestrate a room full of clay. From transient images, living sculptures and forming gestures, they create with their performance a very personal and universal cosmogony of art.
Alain Mahé composed the soundtrack for this performance. Together with the documentary producer Kaye Mortley, he has now transposed the stage event into the world of radio. An ephemeral sound sculpture which unfolds behind closed eyes and targets the ears.
The composition "im klangrand" (in the edge of sound) examines various aspects of the acoustic events at the horizon of perception: Auditory thresholds, transitions and passages, playing with sound in the foreground and background as well as with the distant sources of sound which reach the edges of the universe. Johannes S. Sistermanns found the material for this work in the Australian Outback, the Rhine valley, the Atlantic Ocean of France and in the movement of the stems of a corn field. He listened to the Deutzer bridge spanning the river Rhine in Cologne, New York's Times Square, a Chinese pedestrian tunnel between bustling main streets, and the spacious district around the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Sistermanns composes with everyday items and everyday actions, text margins, edges of voices, with extensive interior spaces and not least with the sounds of pulsars. These distant stars emit radio waves which can be converted into audible noise signals.Sistermanns does not use any artificial reverb and echo effects in the processing of his recordings. A part of his composition is created directly in the recording process by the spatial relationship between the microphone and the sound source. In the studio Sistermanns allows these sounds to become porous and frayed, rupturing and merging into new mixtures. In this way he creates a play of identity, self-assertion and constantly newly emerging sound passages.
Instrumental Transcommunication, ITC for short, is a collective term for technical procedures with which the voices of dead people are to be made audible. Tape recorders, radio receivers, sinusoidal tone generators and other devices are used by a large research community in order to make contact with paranormal beings.Dirk Specht and Svann Langguth have transformed these devices into musical instruments. Their focus is not on the transcendental messages of so-called "Electronic Voice Phenomena", but rather on the tonal richness of the EVP research.
Michael Vetter, trained in contemporary composition and Asian sound traditions, turns to European classical music for the first time in his most recent work. In doing this he has selected a reference, which is particularly closely related to his experience as an overtone singer: Johann Sebastian Bach's sonatas for solo violin are a milestone in the history of music when it comes to making sound developments for several voices audible on a single voice instrument. What Bach made possible with elaborate arpeggios, Michael Vetter has been realising for decades through exceptional vocal and instrumental techniques. Vetter is now reverently approaching the great Baroque master in a two voice improvisation with his partner Natascha Nikeprelevic. The musical core from "An Baches Rand" (At the periphery of J.S. Bach) is made up of the Grave from the Sonata for Solo Violin No. 2 in A minor. Michael Vetter interpreted this highly-concentrated movement on the recorder and framed it with two meditations for voice, recorder and piano.
Inspired by Martin Buber's anthology of mystical writings, the brothers Marc and Nicolas T. Weiser draw up an acoustic liturgy. Inner states are transmitted to the outside as if through a membrane where they are condensed into associative soundspaces."The concept of mysticism is often explained with a reference to the Greek word 'myein', which means with eyes and ears closed. We are trying to approach the topic of the inaudible, attempting to bring to sound that which strictly speaking cannot be made audible. This has to do with the presence of the absent, with the silence in the sound itself. In the moment a melody is heard, it is has already passed. Every note and every sound has this transitory quality, the property of transition." (Weiser)
"Good evening ... we're playing 'Telephone' on air." These words opened a four-hour broadcast on Deutschlandradio Kultur's medium and long wave frequencies on 21 March 2009. On the World Day of Poetry the sound artist Alessandro Bosetti transformed the medium of radio into a gigantic sound poetry generator. Broadcast messages on the edge of intelligibility were received by listeners around the world, transcribed, and returned to the radio station from where they were broadcast once again until this became an abstract, musical, mysterious and humorous sound composition.Arcoparlante is a "speaking arc". An international electromagnetic festival of language games, absurdities, creative transmission errors.
"I'll just take the rubbish out." – An everyday act is observed, ends up in the background and disappears. It is replaced by an acoustic, artificial course, which is run through again and again. Reconnaissance is based on speculation. Orientation goes out the window.Serge Baghdassarians and Boris Baltschun break well-known acoustic spaces into pieces with their microphones. Acoustic details define an apparently logical sequence, are taken out of their surroundings and start to become independent. A chronology topples in schizophone sceneries."To walk is to lack a place." (Michel De Certeau)
The Sorbian Pastor Jan Kilian (1811-1884) had a dream: In order to keep his Old Lutheran faith from the clutches of the Prussian authorities, he decided to seek salvation in a foreign land. His initial emigration plan, was to go to a continent of which he could have only have had a very vague idea: Australia. The Australian composer Colin Black travelled to Jan Kilian's homeland in Upper Lusatia. He made location recordings of Kilian's churches, interviewed Sorbs who live there today, and researched historical documents. From this material he reconstructs an acoustic phantasm of his own homeland: Australia becomes a shimmering sound space between imagination and reality. - Jan Kilian never set foot on Australian soil. He emigrated to Texas in 1854 with 550 other Sorbian Lutherans.
Peaceful and hotly contested at the same time, untouched and yet surveyed with millimetre precision: the Antarctic is a focal point of conflicting developments. 50 years after the Antarctic Treaty, which opened up the continent for scientific purposes, the New York composer DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) went to visit on site. He set up his studio amid the ice masses, in order to sketch the landscape musically. From the perspective of the culture of sampling, he describes an open, untameable world, a precarious utopia and projection surface. "Terra nullius is the acoustic portrait of an abstract landscape: Ice, water, land, climate change and mankind's relationship to it. The Antarctic as a document of collective memory and as a meditation on a future without property. A post-colonial composition." (DJ Spooky)
"Small discrete sounds. Chants which are too subtle to attract our attention. Sounds on the edge of the auditory threshold. Noises that we take no longer take any notice of, because we are continually surrounded by them. This is the material of 'Les petits riens'." In her new work, the French-Canadian composer Chantal Dumas guides our hearing through a suite of acoustic spaces, through a cabinet of curiosities with precisely selected sound objects. She calls our listening habits into question and turns conventional sound structures upside down. "In 'Les petits riens' I would like to bring to light a poetic rhythm of everyday life which we have missed out on up to now." (Chantal Dumas)
"The situation is commonplace. You are on the phone and think that you are speaking to the person you expected, only to find out you are mistaken. It is the brother or sister, father or mother - the vocal similarity has played a trick on us. The radio play Zweizwilling (Two-twin) builds on this experience, in which texts of a poetic and documentary nature spoken by five pairs of twins are connected with the sounds of musical twins. Among other instrument pairings, the focus of the piece is on the piano twins, the combination of a regular and a prepared piano. As a result of the particular treatment given to the instrument, weightless sound structures are created, with a mysterious tonality in which the text passages sit like islands" (Stephan Froleyks)
The American 'National Security Agency' has operated a worldwide intelligence monitoring network for decades under the name of 'Echelon'. Its antennas and sensors are usually concealed beneath large white domes. Thomas Ankersmit and Valerio Tricoli enter into the decommissioned listening complex on Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain) on the outskirts of Berlin and play with the metaphoric and acoustic resonances:
"The radar building in the espionage facility in Grunewald forest is the most fascinating acoustic background I have ever experienced. The dome is made out of fibreglass hexagons, the floor out of concrete. This results in spectacular reverberation, as well as a complex arrangement of strongly focussed echoes. The place becomes a real being, which responds immediately to musical stimuli." (Thomas Ankersmit)
On 17 January, the Ars Acustica group of the European Broadcasting Union establishes a European-wide sound art network for Art's Birthday as they do every year. Deutschlandradio Kultur contributed with the network opera SOBRALASOLAS! The title is taken from the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.SOBRALASOLAS! does not have a preestablished scenario, tells no story and is not a documentary. It is rather a place for glossolalies and echolalias, on-the-fly recordings and collected improvisations.SOBRALASOLAS! combines collected and improvised sounds, with the aim of creating a new listening and auditory environment, which is both fictional and real, time-specific and site-specific. The participating artists are all located at different places around the world. They improvise from there, orienting themselves only to a jointly developed score. Jérôme Joy mixes the sound event live in pfefferberg house 13 in Berlin.
»Falls ich noch einen letzten Film drehen würde, dann über das Zusammenspiel von Wissenschaft und Terrorismus.« (Luis Buñuel)
Kurz vor seinem Tod zieht sich Luis Buñuel gemeinsam mit Jean-Claude Carrière zum letzten Mal in sein mexikanisches Lieblingshotel zurück, um an einem Drehbuch zu arbeiten. Enttäuscht stellen beide fest, dass die Bar des Hauses verschwunden ist. Der Film wird nie gedreht.
30 Jahre später konfrontiert der Klangkünstler Werner Cee das apokalyptische Skript mit dem Sound der Karfreitagsprozessionen aus Buñuels Heimatstadt Calanda: »Dieses Trommeln, ein unglaubliches, mächtiges, kosmisches Phänomen, das das kollektive Unterbewusstsein anrührt, lässt den Boden unter den Füßen beben.« (Luis Buñuel)
The black people of South Africa have been exploited for more than a hundred years in the gold mines of Gauteng. While the precious metal is brought to the surface under life-threatening conditions, another wealth remains beneath the earth: The singing of the miners reflects the country's diverse musical traditions
Lucia Ronchetti and Philip Miller invite us to a nocturnal tour through the underground labyrinth of voices and sounds.
The production was supported by the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg.
"Sebenza e-mine" (Zulu) refers to going down a mineshaft.
Two of the key figures of electro-acoustic music came into the world in the summer of 1910: Oskar Sala, the first virtuoso player as well as developer of the trautonium. And Pierre Schaeffer, founder of "musique concrète", radio producer and writer. Both innovators created a rare harmony between technical and artistic developments. Both were closely connected to the medium of radio. And both are regarded today as icons of electro-acoustic music in the broadest sense.
The authors follow the traces of Sala and Schaeffer in the contemporary sound art scene as well as looking back on their lives and works.
Lasse-Marc Riek composed the Sound of the Month for Deutschlandradio Kultur for twelve months. In his 'Kalenderstücken' (Calendar pieces) he compresses sounds from all the four seasons into acoustic jewels: The train leaving for a summer tour, the returning of the cattle from alpine pastures in the autumn and the rain in April are modelled into soundscapes that walk around the horizon of a whole year with jaunty exuberance and inscrutable melancholy. Walking tours through the sounds of nature are thus transformed imperceptibly into reflections on the nature of sounds.
For his concert in the DeutschlandRadio Berlin broadcasting studio, Riek combines the individual compositions into the sound image of a whole year.
Vilified and disappointed by the German world of music, the composer Stefan Weisz emigrated to New York in 1933. In search of new sounds he meets colleagues who are keen to experiment, such as Edgar Varèse and Henry Cowell. He notes: "Manhattan is big, wide, fast, and above all lonely. Can this be the future of the music?"
Shortly before the outbreak of the war, Weisz returns to Berlin, where he makes an astonishing musical discovery. His last diary entry in 1945 reads: "Make a list of the voices."
Allen S. Weiss combines historical compositions, facts and fiction to create a radio essay between philosophy and phantasm.
The listener eavesdrops on a strange conversation between two computers asking about each other's "problems" as if they were psychoanalysts.
Largo do Guimaraes, a three-road plaza in the centre of Rio de Janeiro. An imagined body whose profile is slowly modelled in the course of muscle-building measures. Serge Baghdassarians and Boris Baltschun subject the name, the architecture and the acoustic appearance of the plaza to a tonal triangulation. At the end of their acoustic training, the plaza is in ideal condition, an artificial sound body which makes the unusual appear unfamiliar and thereby strangely familiar.
Esperienza Italia', Italy is celebrating its 150th anniversary under this motto in 2011. Reason enough for sound artist Alessandro Bosetti to undertake a journey into the past of his home country. His 'Experience Italy' does not however find Bosetti in Rome, Turin or Milan, but rather in Eritrea.
The former East African colony appears to him like a preserved pre-war Italy. The language and culture of the now-disappeared invaders lie across the country like a dense fog. With the help of the bystander optician Benedetto Spinoza, Bosetti's microphone becomes a lens for time.
"Italy is at a standstill. Eritrea is at a standstill. They are circling around each other. They are reflecting each other." (Bosetti)
„Sleep (an attempt at trying)“ is a radio suite for vocalist, narrator, improvising ensemble and electronics. In this project Bumšteinas explored the subject of insomnia which makes it a very autobiographic project. The main sound material for “Sleep” came from the sleeping-aid and relaxation tapes, that Bumšteinas bought for himself in various fleamarkets around Europe. The course of personal therapy wasn't too successful and due to nocturnal boredom Bumšteinas started dabbling with the functional music used on these tapes. Later Bumšteinas began to enrich these tape collages with his own instrumental recordings and additional electronic sounds and so from these authentic creative actions developed a series of strong musical structures that were finally joined by a lead vocalist and an international improviser's ensemble which was specially gathered for this occasion. The final form of “Sleep” consists of 7 songs and 3 instrumental tracks of a highly nocturnal, even hypnotic, nature. The lyrics of the songs a derived from the verbal contents featuring on the initial sleeping-aid tapes.
Every broadcast of “Sleep” is presented live according to a narrative plot written by Arturas Bumšteinas which consists of various insights around the theme of insomnia, such as – overview of insomnia in ancient China, contemporary jokes about insomnia, confessions of the narrator to the listeners and a live call from the listener of the broadcast. In general this broadcast has an aim to make impression of a spontaneous, improvised narration with music by various bands played in between the talking. In order to strengthen this impression various imaginary band names were invented and so all the songs that were played on this broadcast were presented as the courtesy of “The Insomniacs”, “Sleepless International” and “Sheep Orchestra”.
Kyrre Bjørkås – solo vocals; Ilia Belorukov – sax, clarinet, flute; Dominykas Vyšniauskas – flugelhorn; Tadas Žukauskas – violin; Kęstutis Pleita – viola; Anthony Pirog – guitar; Leonard van Voorst – percussion; Arturas Bumšteinas – piano, accordion, percussion, block-flute, violin; Marcus Gammel - presentation.
Composed and produced by Arturas Bumšteinas. Recorded on various portable studios in Vilnius, Warsaw, Oslo, St.Petersburg, Washington DC and in the studio of Deutschlandradio Kultur, Berlin between April and September of 2011.
Six artists, one cinema auditorium, two rules:
1. There is nothing to see. 2. The radio is the screen.
Deutschlandradio Kultur and the Berlinale's Forum Expanded feature a joint carte blanche for sound art in film. Six actors from the fields of audio, video and media art are given free rein for an experimental sound projection in the ether.
The compositions comprise:
1 Natascha Sadr Haghighian: Cutting Barbed Wire in Four Settings - 1 (2'01)
2 Dani Gal / Achim Lengerer: CORD (9'26)
3 Natascha Sadr Haghighian: Cutting Barbed Wire in Four Settings - 2 (2'15)
4 Tony Conrad: Permission (10')
5 Natascha Sadr Haghighian: Cutting Barbed Wire in Four Settings - 3 (2'09)
6 Keren Cytter: Der Prozess / The Trial (9'51)
7 Natascha Sadr Haghighian: Cutting Barbed Wire in Four Settings - 4 (2'28)
Dickson Dee, alias Li Chin Sung, has been working as a producer, composer and music blogger in Hong Kong for over 20 years. He has collaborated among others with Zbigniew Karkowski, Otomo Yoshihide, Werner Dafeldecker and Tetsuo Furudate. He runs the Noise Asia and Dicksonia Audio labels.
Born in Tuva in 1957, Sainkho Namtchylak has been studying Siberian ritual music styles since her childhood. She has worked with musicians such as Peter Kowald, Werner Lüdi, Shelley Hirsch and Jan Garbarek.
Wu Wei is considered to be the world's leading virtuoso of the sheng, a Chinese mouth organ. He has performed traditional, contemporary and improvised music with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ensemble Modern, Peter Kowald and Gunter Baby Sommer among others. He has been commissioned for compositions by Musica Viva in Munich, the Fondation Royaumont and the Slought Foundation, Chicago.
The philosopher Denis Diderot was actually only looking for a harpsichord teacher for his daughter Angélique. Her classes with music teacher Anton Bemetzrieder however, regularly ended up in rambling discussions between the teacher and the father on the theory of music. These finally led to the 'Leçons de Clavecin' - a bizarre tract between harmony and sound philosophy. The musicologist Veit Erlmann has re-imagined the dialogues of the music enlighteners and has added a further figure: The physiologist Claude-Nicolas Le Cat mixes himself knowledgeably into these intellectual games concerning the resonating structure of body and spirit.
"My organ has many stops. I play the world with its keys. Between choral music and ship's horns, between animal organs and human machines, between toys and gods, my fingers mellotronise and hammondise all the sounds of this earth. The organ as a world - the world as an organ." (Stefano Giannotti)
In his new work, the Italian radio composer Stefano Giannotti records the old dream of a universal sound machine.
From the splashing of its sources to the crashing of waves: Water is music to our ears. But what would it sound like if this precious liquid were to run dry?
Hanna Hartman has visited places, which have long been suffering from acute water shortages. With her microphones, she has plunged into water pipes, wells and irrigation systems. Instead of bubbling and rushing sounds, you can now hear whistling, hissing and rattling. Hanna Hartman's acoustic search for something drinkable has brought forth a disturbing sound world.
Test signals are not exactly popular among people. Until the present day, they are associated with lunchtime intermissions and with fixed colour bars. Their sound characteristics range from static white noise through sweeping frequencies, rustling, hissing and interval signs up to vocal sounds and classic soundcheck signals. They are almost always experienced as unpleasant and irritating . They remain in an eternal condition of "before", their destiny the waiting loop of optimization.
In time for Art's Birthday, the Hamburg sound futurist Felix Kubin and the Viennese dance performer Veronika Zott release the test signals from the prison of their functionality and condense them into a composition of interval signs, extreme frequencies, voicing methods and sound movements.
How does your Europe sound? Over the last year, Deutschlandradio Kultur, the Goethe Institute in Belgrade and the Institute for Music and Acoustics of the ZKM in Karlsruhe put this question to prospective sound artists from Gibraltar to the Ural mountains. The response was more than 180 contributions from 25 countries. The ten best artists were invited to a workshop at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. There they were able to develop a joint concept of the sound panorama of Europe with the media artist Thomas Köner. The result was premiered in Karlsruhe on 22 October.
Arthur Rimbaud loved travelling – both physically and metaphorically. His life and his poems are full of erratic walks, pilotless drifting ships and obscure places. However, the precocious genius ended his literary production at the tender age of 21. From then until his death, he continued only to write sober letters from the various stations of his odysseys.
In 'Semelles de vent' ('Soles of wind'), the composer Bruno Letort combines dry notes from Stuttgart, Cyprus, Aden, Alexandria and Harare with the lyrical journeys from Rimbaud's youth. Field recordings, voices and instrumental sounds merge into a hallucinatory soundscape.
11.11.11, shortly after midnight. The carnival of the century is warming up. Costumes are rustling, commentators are murmuring in their microphones, glasses are being filled and emptied. An unheard-of sound procession begins to pass by the audience. Surreal acoustic beings turn into and against one other, pianos spray their entrails, dead carousels awaken to life, and listeners become increasingly ecstatic.
Düsseldorf 1979. The artist Moritz Reichelt founds the band "Der Plan" with two friends. The first sessions are recorded with a dictation machine and released on his own label "Ata Tak". The Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave) is rolling on to its peak.
Chemnitz 1985. The artist Frank Bretschneider gathers a group of like-minded people. None of them can really play an instrument, but they all want to move on to pastures new. AG Geige releases its first cassette one year later.
Berlin 2011. More than 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and 50 years after its construction two German artists meet. They have much in common, but have never actually spoken about it.
The Iguazu Falls are one of the largest wonders of nature in the world. More than one million tourists marvel every year at the cataracts on the border between Argentina and Brazil.
Before the Europeans arrived, the area was home to the Tupi-Guarani Indians. They called the waterfalls 'Yguasu', which means 'big water', and they granted the roaring giant a central role in their culture.
The sound artist Mario Verandi travelled to the descendants of the Guarani and investigated their acoustic relationship to the waterfalls. He composed a musical anthropological auditory journey out of natural and instrumental sounds.
One recognizes real silk by its sound. The typical scrunching feel of the material reminds us of walking on freshly fallen snow. This 'Seidenschrei' ('silk scream') had been considered the distinguishing feature of the ladies of the upper classes for centuries. In the meantime, the electrical crackling of synthetic fibres has spread across the catwalks of the High Society. 'The traditional padding is worn through' writes Max Weber, and by that he means that it is no longer possible to escape the developments of the modern age. Deep in our unconscious however remains the familiar rustling of the eiderdowns, the gentle sound of warming wool or the loud shaking of wet laundry. The naked human carries within itself a cosmos of memories of the protective second skin, smell and sound, colour and structure.
Without him, E.T. would not have been able to telephone, Luke Skywalker's lightsaber would never have hummed and "Wall-E" would have walked through a mute future: Ben Burtt is one of the old masters of cinematic sound design.
Over the last 30 years he has brought entire families of strange creatures to life.
The Berlin composer and noisemaker Frieder Butzmann now uncovers the traces of this life like the fossils of a lost world. He separates them out of the debris of significance and into their own time.
There short scenes, dramas and symphonies develop between the most diverse creatures. Speeder bikes, extraterrestrials and natural disasters develop a sound world of their own.
Nine people walk across Berlin's former Tempelhof Airport. With headset-mikes and an individual audio guide they follow the same route one after the other. At the same time they speak continually. They 'film' their route by speaking, disassembling it into single images. The radio artist Antje Vowinckel assembles a auditory panorama of 'Tempelhof Freedom' from these currents of speech. Different perspectives overlap, a kind of acoustic squint emerges.
In this way Vowinckel presents a place in upheaval. No longer an airport, not yet a park, the area as a construction of many becomes audible, as a transition between the times. A projection surface for visions.
Contributors: Dave Ball, Clarisse Cossais, Axel Dörner, Fernanda Farah, Shelley Hirsch, Sven-Åke Johansson, Annette Krebs, Chico Mello, Antje Vowinckel
In the late 1950’s, the first vinyl audio recordings for home use appeared. They had names like „The Set“, „Music to Underlay“ and „Sounds in Stereo, with Alignment Grooves and Announcements“, and were directed primarily at „the home-movie maker, and friend of audio and slide shows“. In the piece presented here, Felix Kubin compiled a polymorphic sound library based on this format, which aims to free sounds from the catalog. A combinatorial game with real and fake names throws modes of listening into ever greater confusion, and cedes to the audio artefacts’ own communication with one another. Identification grooves begin to flicker. A sound log dissolves into its constituent parts. The previously well-arranged recorded past attains a new archaic presence of multiple audio fictions.
Francisco López is a master of contrasts. In his compositions, gracefully constructed sound patterns are located immediately adjacent to powerful noise cascades. This possibly also has a lot to do with López' multifaceted interests: The doctor in biology studies the acoustic ecology of the Amazon jungle as well as the sound worlds of machinery.
Francisco López collected the recordings of international cities for more than 20 years for his composition 'Sonopolis'. From of this material, he has composed a journey through an imaginary world metropolis – a virtual conglomerate of Montreal and Ushuaia, Lisbon and Moscow, Dakar and Cape Town, Taipei and Melbourne.
"What does a continent sound like?" Sound artist Christian Calon pursued this question on a long journey through North America. During this time he oriented himself towards the "Continental Divide", the watersheds between the rivers that drain into the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans.
On large-scale maps, such structures only appear as areas of abstract colour and cryptic signs. For this reason, Christian Calon views his passage through the mountains and plains as a temporal flow.
His map is formed acoustically: He combines textures and contours, the rhythmic and the material variations of the landscape to a musical form between soundscape and sonification.
Organization of the tables
Each watershed comprises several ecosystems/ecozones. The sound cutting in tables corresponds to these zones. Names of the tables and type of ecozone.
1 - Atlantic watershed
the zones are located in the province of Quebec between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of St. Lawrence
Main rivers/hydrographic network :
Great Lakes - St. Lawrence River
1. Lower St. Lawrence Atlantic maritime - Mixedwood Plains
2. Lower North Shore Boreal Shield (forest)
3. Charlevoix Boreal Shield mountains
4. St. Lawrence River valley alluvial plains of the St. Lawrence
5. North Shore tundra of the Boreal Shield (subarctic) (Gulf of St. Lawrence)
______________________________________________________________
2- Arctic and Hudson Bay watershed
the zones overlap the central Canadian provinces (Manitoba (MB), Saskatchewan (SK), Alberta- (AB))
Main rivers/hydrographic network :
Bow River + Oldman River > South Saskatchewan River
Saskatchewan Glacier > North Saskatchewan River
Qu'Appelle River, Assiniboine River
Lakes of Manitoba
Nelson River
1. Hudson Bay (MB) Hudson Plains and Boreal Shield
2. The Prairies (MB-SK-AB) Prairies
3. The Rocky Mountains (AB) Montane Cordillera
4. Arctic (Ogilvie Mountains, Yukon) Taiga Cordillera
______________________________________________________________
3 - Pacific watershed
All of these zones are included in the province of British Columbia (BC)
Main rivers/hydrographic network :
Fraser River
Skeena River
Thompson River
Columbia River
1. Prairie Prairie (north of BC)
2. Cassiar Boreal Cordillera (forests and mountains (within the Coast Mountains) north of BC)
3. Skeena Pacific Maritime (Skeena River and Coast Mountains, (North BC)
4. Thompson semi-arid zone - Montane Cordillera (interior of BC)
5. Pacific Rim littoral, Coast Mountains and rain forest
The city of New York was both home and laboratory for John Cage. The composer found plenty of like-minded people and stimuli for his radical innovations in the exuberant art scene.
The Canadian sound artist Chantal Dumas follows John Cage's traces in the Big Apple. While doing so she combines the background noises of his places of activity with the sounds of his favoured instruments: Piano, turntables, voice and percussion blend as if by chance into the sound image of the city.
John Cage received his first big commission in 1942 to compose a soundtrack for a radio play: 'The City Wears a Slouch Hat' was written by the Beat poet Kenneth Patchen. An omniscient, omnipotent character called 'The Voice' wanders through the streets of Chicago.
Cage wrote an ambitious score for big city noises and electronic sounds - only to receive a harsh rebuff a few days before the broadcast: The Columbia Broadcasting Studio told him that his ideas were not feasible, and so Cage quickly wrote a more modest substitute score.
The original manuscript has been lost, but has frequently given rise to speculation: It could be that with it Cage laid the foundation stone for his subsequent work with silence and chance.
Commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur, seven contemporary audio artists imagine the path of 'The Voice' through cities such as New York, Berlin and Bangalore.
1. Vorübergehend aufgenommen (Temporarily recorded)
by Stella Luncke and Josef Maria Schäfers
Voice: Katia Guedes and Günter Papendell
Production: Deutschlandradio Kultur 2012
Length: variable / broadcast length: 7’23
2. Will we miss the planes when they are gone?
by Peter Cusack
Production: Deutschlandradio Kultur 2012
Length: 9’43
3. Cityhack Alexanderplatz
by Sam Auinger / Bruce Odland
Production: Deutschlandradio Kultur 2012
Length: 8’31
4. Tokyo Tanka
by Hannes Strobl
Production: Artist's production 2012
Length: 7’40
In collaboration with Sam Auinger, developed in the tamtam project through the engagement with the urban world of sounds and individual musical language, which finds its expression in this piece.
The source material for the piece " tokyo tanka " is an audio recording of a crossroads in the district of ikebukuro (tokyo) from the year 2009. The changing of the traffic lights results in a tonal pattern, which is characterised by a wave-like progression.
5. Eye Contact with the City
by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Production: Artist's production 2012
Length: 9’59
Bautzen II, the GDR's dreaded special prison: This is where the Stasi imprisoned its particularly dangerous 'public enemies' between 1956 and 1989. For the political prisoners this often meant solitary confinement. Frank Bretschneider, Moritz von Rappard and Thomas Ritschel query to what extent this sensory deprivation may have influenced and changed the prisoners' auditory perception. In 'Hörgang Bautzen II' they process acoustic and personal impressions of the memorial site. They undertake an auditory expedition along the narrow border between the inner and the outer world of sound.
»... all reality is indescribable, and I know instinctively: Consciousness is structured like our language (and for good reason!), yet not the world, and not the unconscious.« (Alain Robbe-Grillet)
With his book 'Ghosts in the Mirror' (1985) Alain Robbe-Grillet reflects and breaks the genre of autobiography. He exposes memory as a construction, whose references to what is remembered move around in a dream-like fashion. On the 90th birthday of the pioneer of the Nouveau Roman, two musicians follow the traces of his automythography. René Desalmand collects sounds from Robbe-Grillet's home in Brittany. With the drummer Michael Wertmüller, he develops musical structures which are derived from Robbe-Grillet's texts. Music is to noise as fiction is to sensory perception.
»We transfer a knowledge to something, attribute meaning and importance to it: In this way everything is degraded to carriers of meanings, substances, mere materials and projection surfaces.«(Franz Xaver Baier)
'start listening' is a rejection of the meaning, the importance and of the motivated form. The musician and composer Johannes S. Sistermanns wants neither to mediate nor to relate. He gathered his acoustic starting material together without a specific objective and edited it using an automated procedure. For him it is not nonsense that lies beyond sense, but rather ambiguity. A piece that remains hanging in the balance and it is precisely because of this it can be experienced directly and in all its facets.
Home has a sound: The folk song celebrates the connection between people and places with a particular potency. In this age of globalisation, people's yearning for acoustic roots is particularly large – and it leads us between the 'Musikantenstadl' and world music into the absurd. "Home is utopia", says Bernhard Schlink. "You experience it most intensely when you are away and you are missing it; homesickness is the actual sense of home." The Merzouga duo takes an old Ukrainian folk song and puts it in the mouths of modern musical nomads. They stage field recordings in container ports and freight terminals. They disassemble the melody into its individual components electronically and then reassemble them. At the end they are left with the substrate of a yearning.
Nord Rute, is the first of four ambisonic projects, inspired by the literary works, drawings and soundscapes of the Sámi multi-artist Nils Aslak Valkeapää. "Nord Rute" takes the Norwegian Sámi as its central thème. They are the only ethnic group in the European Union classified as an indigenous people. They are a minority that inhabit four countries – Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula of Russia and have their own language and culture in which music and art have emerged as influential tools in the process of maintaining community and identity.
Part docu-poem, part music score, part folk tale and part sound montage, Nord Rute captures the events of a reindeer migration to their spring birthing pastures on the shores of Porsangerfjord, northern Norway. Ross travelled 450 kilometres across vast plateaus, through valleys and over frozen lakes with Klemet Amund Eira and his ‘siida’ – a collective of Sámi herding families – and their reindeer. Klemet’s family have been travelling with the reindeer from time immemorial. Ross recorded the age-old journey together with mountain recordings of Ingor Antte Ailu Gaup Joiking – an improvisational expression of self and nature intended to translate the ‘essence’ of a person or place into song – and his contemplations on the Noaide (Sámi Shaman).
Incorporated into the narrative is an interpretation of Valkeapää’s poem ‘No.272’, from his book ‘The Sun, My Father’, with spoken word by Synnøve Persen and processed Mbira performed by Ross. Synnøve was recorded in woods near her homeplace in Porsanger. Poem No.272 is about a reindeer herd on the move examining the Sámis’ complex terms for describing reindeer and sounds of the arctic tundra.
Amidst the dense, gritty field recordings and sound design, poet Ánde Somby travels between city soundscapes, tundra and underworld offering thoughts on his connection to the tundra, dreamtime, the gift of the reindeer from the ‘underground people’ and what the hunted animal has to say to the hunter, whilst echoing Valkeapää’s message on the importance of traditions, the bringing together of cultures and what people and industrialisation can learn from indigenous, ancient knowledge systems.
Nord Rute was performed live through a 12 speaker ambisonic array at the Barents Spektakel Festival in Norway from the centre of a giant ice maze beneath the northern lights. A stereo version was adapted for radio on Deutschlandradio Kultur.
1959 sounds out the relationship between recording and remembering,
between the fixed time of the medium and the fluent time of memory.
Different scenes and reflections gel in an in a “theatre of the past that is
constituted by memory” (Gaston Bachelard).
The composition includes sounds of a harp, a piano, flute, electronics,
cassettes, telephones, wind, water, my family, my family home, my
hometown and Henry Purcell. The recordings were taken the past
six years and the first eight years of my life.
The piece came into being in the second half of 2012 and was composed
inbetween moving from my old apartment in Erfurt and my new
apartment in Weimar, at my family home in Alsace und the SeaM studio
in Weimar.
Harp: Veronika Ehrensperger.
The work is dedicated to the memory of my mother (born 1959).
Do plants produce sounds? Do they possibly even possess musical potential? On the lookout for talented members of a plant orchestra, Christina Ertl-Shirley trawls through a wide variety of disciplines: from the fields of botany, via biochemistry, esotericism, floristics, interactive electronics right up to musicology.
As with the majority of casting shows, the actual question and at the same time also the most difficult one to answer is: Which candidate remains at the end? And who has to go? To top it all off, the best sounding plants perform a composition together.
"The current volume is called Splendor Solis or The Splendour of the Sun. It is divided into seven chapters through which the artificial effect of the hidden stone of the old philosopher is described.
The 'Splendor Solis' is regarded as one of the most magnificent illuminated manuscripts of alchemy. Originating around 1531, it served the adept not only as a guide, but also as an inspiration to achieve the state of mystical immersion. Only in this attitude of mind can the transmutation of elements be set in motion. Sound artist Jürgen Seizew describes the 22 illuminations of the 'Splendor Solis' in texts, sound miniatures and noise arrangements. His goal is the transmutation of the audible.
"Then through the Power of Heat, the Spirit hidden in the Earth is brought into the Air. He who can bring forth a hidden Thing, He is a Master of this Art. He who sees the Soul, will see it's Colour."
In 1913 Luigi Russolo published the Futurist manifesto "L'arte dei rumori" ('The Art of Noises'). In this he proclaimed the age of noise-sounds: The machine has created "such a variety and such a contention of noises that pure sound in its slightness and monotony no longer provokes emotion".
100 years later, Lithuanian composer Arturas Bumšteinas goes looking for signs of Futurism. He finds what he is looking for in the Baroque era, where noise machines arrived in theatres, René Descartes described the human body as a machine, and equal temperament was not yet alone in determining the tonal system.
Bumšteinas combines recordings of old theatre machines with sounds from the harpsichord and prepared harpsichord:
Emotive Baroque music meets futuristic effect noises.
The radio studio as an allegory: An arrangement of rooms, connected to each other by windows and miking, different groups going about their respective jobs simultaneously: producing, directing, controlling, recording, playing back, reflecting. The result is a film about the place that produces for listening. A radio play is produced which attempts to compensate the invisibility of a film.
'Studio' plays back the film repeatedly, with different versions acoustically approaching the missing visual. Overlays of the audio tracks, descriptions of what has been seen, interpretations of the control situation. Kötter and Seidl present four possible audio versions of an unseen allegorical film.
Rocher Percé is an arched rock formation off the coast of Quebec, home to tens of thousands of seabirds and a repository of remarkable fossils. André Breton visited the natural monument in 1944 and was inspired to write his book 'Arcane 17'. In this he combines reflections on Canadian fauna, the myth of Melusine, fascism and the ecstasy of new-found love.
Christopher Williams, Charlie Morrow and Robin Hayward translate this surreal mind game into sound: Natural sounds from the Rocher Percé mix with instrumental notes and text fragments from Breton. Please have your headphones ready.
A stereo system is fastened to a cart that has been cobbled together. Verses from the Koran and Islamic music ring out from the speakers: In this way the Carroussa proceeds through the streets of Morocco.
This form of mobile radio inspired the artist and curator Younes Baba-Ali to an unusual project: In June 2012, he drove his 'Carroussa Sonore' through Rabat, laden with experimental music, radiophonic plays, soundscapes and text compositions. The cart pulls a soundtrack along behind itself, which is soon lost in the dusty streets. For a brief moment, the 'Carroussa Sonore' creates a previously unknown cartography of the city. Younes Baba-Ali and Anna Raimondo trace their paths for the radio.
"He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging." With these words Walter Benjamin describes a time which moves forward synchronously, preserved in many layers lying on top of one another rather than chronologically.
In 'Progress', the musician Marc Behrens gently uncovers fragments of his family history in Germany and Poland. The various layers of time interfuse and overlap each other continually: both field recordings as well as speech are recorded using contemporary and historical devices. They merge with original sound recordings of his father, a telecommunications engineer, who maintained the listening facilities at the East / West German border among other things.
'Progress' questions the concept of progress, whether historical, genealogical or technical in nature. For the actual, almost magical potential of history lies not in its course, but in the productive interleaving of layers of time in the here and now.
The 'Songlines' of the Australian aborigines are intended for the purposes of orientation and navigation in the open terrain. Inspired by these songs, the Australian musician and composer Thomas Meadowcroft has musically re-measured his country. In doing so he follows the bus routes along Australia's east coast. Auditory indicators during his trip are provided by service stations, car parks and motorways.
Production SWR - Short List Phonurgia Nova Awards 2013
Selected for Ars Acustica EBU broadcasting.
On the outskirts of Baden Baden lies the Convent of Lichtenthal. Cistercians nuns have been praying and working here since 1245. Their life is conditioned by working for their living. In earlier times, this was only agriculture, but today the sisters have their own school and artists' workshops, or they accommodate guests for a temporary stay. How can this life be "heard" via the media of microphone and sound mixer technology, how can that be artistically represented which can not be said but only shown?
In 1816, following the outbreak of an Indonesian volcano, dry fog obscured the sky over large parts of Europe, screening off the sunlight. The overcast atmosphere also had literary consequences, and inspired Lord Byron to his famous poem 'Darkness'. Today, the experience gained from this 'Year without a summer' serve as an example for representatives of geoengineering, when they are thinking of cooling down the atmosphere with the aid of an artificial volcanic eruption.
'Dry Haze' (Part II of the triptych "The Anthropocene") is the soundtrack to this shaded world.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.
(Lord Byron)
Players: Rachel Unthank, Becky Unthank, Adrian McNally, Neville Tranter
Electric guitar: Alf Terje Hana
E-chin: Werner Cee
EFSF - a string of letters which has dominated European fiscal policy since 2010. The communicability of the ESFS is subjected to a radical review in the radio play "memorandum of understanding" (ger.: "Absichtserklärung")
Serge Baghdassarians and Boris Baltschun have filtered out the letters E, S, and F from the Wikipedia article on the Stability Mechanism. They then had the resulting cloze text spoken by ten synthetic voices. They recruited their speakers from an online translation programme using various pronunciation algorithms.
Baghdassarians and Baltschun have composed a sequence of solo pieces and choral interludes from the voices of the countries participating in the EFSF. They take the incomprehensibility of a highly technocratic language to the extreme, eliciting from it the unexpected potential of sound poetry.
A radio dramatization of Ernest Hemingway's short story "Old man at the Bridge" (1938).
Steppes, deserts, and high mountains dominate
the region of Cuyo in west Argentina. It is as if this quiet landscape
were playing itself: hunks of earth fly through canyons, ebbing water
crackles across salt deserts, small wood chips fall on cactuses, sand
trickles down heaps of metal. Where water runs, fertile valleys and
oases, rich with vegetation, pose a fascinating contrast to the barren
landscape.
The condensed soundscape moves between these extremes. All composed
sounds are unprocessed (except panning and equalization) and were only
produced on location.
For Lea.
Winning piece of the 14th Electroacoustic Composition Competition Música Viva 2013.
On a day in May in the Westerwald, the sound artist Goetz Naleppa made acoustic recordings of 15 colonies of bees. The 'Song of the Bees' builds up to a crescendo in the course of the day:
From early in the morning (few, isolated bees) to the flight of the drones (low frequencies) reaching its culmination at midday. The common thread running through the composition is a text dealing with bees from Virgil's 'Georgics'.
Around this Goetz Naleppa spins seven musical variations from the song of the bees. He spans an arch from Vergil's idyll of the bee community passing over the war dances of the drones up to contemporary bee mortality.
The purpose was to "to find structures within the chaos of thousands of simultaneous sounds, to filter out frequencies, to discover rhythmic elements – to make patterns and 'beauty' audible". (Götz Naleppa)
The walkie talkie is threatened with extinction. Mobile phones and other wireless devices have taken over its role and threaten to finish it off for good. However unimagined qualities lie slumbering in these crackling boxes: Unlike the telephone, each transceiver can listen to any number of recipients. This enables communication with strangers. We hear stories that take place in our immediate vicinity, yet sound as if they came from another world.
As part of the CTM Festival 2014, the Serbian sound artist Lukatoyboy developed a performance for 'Sound Scouts' and radio sets. Deutschlandradio Kultur listened in.
Everything in the sound laboratory of musician and composer Stefano Giannotti is kept in strict order. A pig sounds like a pig, a printer like a printer. But his own soundscapes slip away from the composer and begin to proliferate. Animals become machines and vice versa.
Acoustic bureaucracy as a tightrope walk: Between structure and chaos, original sound form and excessive sound cascade. Composition meets autopoiesis.
At the end everything comes full circle, and 'Bürotifulcrazy' leads the listener through orchestral soundscapes and text collages back to form in itself.
"Could bureaucracy be beautiful? Can we live at all without bureaucracy?" (Stefano Giannotti)
Players: Ilka Teichmüller, Stefano Giannotti, Mariola Krajczewska, Matilde Giannotti, Petra Winkler
Ensemble OTEME - OSSERVATORIO DELLE TERRE EMERSE
Valeria Marzocchi: Flutes
Nicola Bimbi: Oboe, English Horn
Lorenzo del Pecchia: Clarinet
Leonardo Percival Paoli. Bassoon
Maicol Pucci: Trumpet
Valentina Cinquini: Harp
String section of the SCUOLA DI MUSICA SINFONIA ORCHESTRA
Sarah Fanucci, Diana Gaci Scaletti, Nicoletta Olivati, Sofia Cesaretti,
Gianluca Chelini, Andrea del Gratta: Violins
Angela Landi: Solo Violin
Rachele Nucci, Lorenzo Phelan: Cello
A study of smashes - and maybe some splashes ...
"Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble Mumble ( ... ) ." In 1974, action artist Dieter Roth wrote a 176 page play with one single word: Mumble. Pure minimalism.
The performance artist Grace Yoon has now adapted the 'most boring play in the world' for radio. In doing so, she explores the vestiges of semantically empty language and develops a new universe out of six letters.
" ... for the words of the people, when they approach each other, are mumbles ... " (Husayn insisted ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, 8th century)
Players: Martin Engler, Meike Schmitz, Hans Peter Hallwachs, Linda Olsansky, Bo Wiget, Arne Fuhrmann
Choir: Capella Vocale München
"Out of Range" is an audio work based on ultrasound and echolocation used by bats, dolphins and other creatures who operate beyond the range of human hearing - 'seeing' with sound, or perhaps 'hearing' objects.
Sound is invisible. Ultrasound is inaudible. Of course, many species have a greater range of hearing than us humans and also more specific and specialised with complex combinations of the different senses… Creatures on both land and under water produce and/or perceive very high sound frequencies. Some species of insects, birds, fish, and mammals can emit and hear ultrasound, which is used for communications, hunting and orientation. These creatures operate on a different level of perception to us, in an inaudible range above 20kHz...
Many animals also use the acoustic properties of space; a bat, for example, can use the echo from a tower block to amplify their calls for mates in the autumn; toadfish use caves to amplify their calls to protect their habitat. Whales use the different acoustic properties at different depths of the ocean at different pressure levels to send their long distance calls. An astonishing fact about moths is that they have a reflex action using their wings to shut down when they hear a bat's echolocation calls… That we think, this to be astonishing, does that say something about us?
The mix for the piece is based on ultrasound, hydrophone recordings below the water and also of echolocation sound in audible range. The recordings were made at various locations in Central Park and on the East River in New York, USA, a forest outside Kaliningrad in Russia, Regents Park in London, UK, and various locations in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The ultrasound recordings are time-stretched to bring them into a frequency range audible for humans.
Collective memory is undergoing a boom in 2014: It is the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the 1st World War.
On March 4th, Oliver Augst and John Birke take the culture of remembrance and anniversaries to the extremes. In a concert at the Berliner Volksbühne, accompanied by eight musicians, they commemorated all the dead of 1914 – from Christian Morgenstern to Bertha von Suttner up to Pope Pius X.
Individual fates were evoked, curious anecdotes unearthed, connections between biographies conjured up from scratch. An acoustic-fantastic satire has arisen from the recording.
A peep-hole both narrows and sharpens a view equally. How could an acoustic counterpart to this sound? Alessandro Bosetti set off in search of one and found what he was looking for at the beginnings of radio culture with all its limitations: In the 1930s there were no effects, no cuts and, above all, no stereophony.
In a carefully rehearsed choreography, Alessandro Bosetti lets six members of the 'Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart' group dance around a single microphone: Their goal is to give spaciousness to the mono signal.
The radio as a peep-hole. We are broadcasting the adaptation of an experimental arrangement on the stage.
In 1963, off the coast of Iceland, Surtsey emerged after an underwater volcanic eruption. The birth of a volcanic island is a rare event that occurs on average twice a century. Unlike Surtsey most of these islands disappear quickly. After 50 years of existence, Surtsey is still tenacious, but its days are numbered due to the rough tides of the North Atlantic that will erode the island sooner or later. Closed to the public, only a few scientists have access to the island since its emergence, to observe and study the explosion of life on an a priori sterile ground.
Scientists envision the island as a time capsule. As the youngest member of the Westman Islands, Surtsey is a window to the past of the older islands of the archipelago. Reciprocally, those older islands are a window to what Surtsey might become like in the future. Lending the approach of science, Nýey orchestrates an abstract conversation between the sound environment of the island – past, present, future – and the community exploring it.
Gidayū is a 300-year old Japanese theatrical tradition. Originally a puppet theatre, Gidayū evolved over time into a purely acoustic art form: One person, alone on stage chants with their voice all of the roles and also allof the sounds of a narrative. Here there is a connection between Gidayū and audio drama and radio art.
Allen S. Weiss and Daisuke Ishida spent five days on the road with a microphone: With a backdrop of the sounds of Kyoto, they followed the traces of Gidayū in everyday life. They visited a tea ceremony, a Shinto shrine, the Hōnen-in Temple, a shopping centre and the famous zen garden at Ryōan-ji.
"Because Kyoto is both: City and phantasmagoria, the piece is likewise travelogue as well as music." (Allen S. Weiss)
With many thanks to the Kyoto Bus Company, to the musicians, Robert Yellin and Robert Mangold; to Umeda Minoru for the tea ceremony, to Troy Reilly, Mark Halpern, Umeda Mitsuko, Ikeba Kumi, Hitomi Shimizu and Michael Lazarin for their generous assistance and to François Bizet for the inspiration.
Meister Eckhart is regarded as the most important representative of German mysticism. He spoke of the negation of negation, taught hearing without ears, seeing without eyes, speaking without sound. His spaces were infinitely large and microscopically small, his places silent.
The radio play "The silent desert - Meister Eckhart" resembles a recitative: A child of reading age tries to decipher Eckhart's writings. At the same time, the sound artist Thomas Köner interprets the in places obscure text as a composition strategy: How can tones be differentiated in a panorama, in which everything is shadow and night? What tempi does a flow have without flowing?
There are secrets which are none. Such as that, for example, of German arms production. The federal government's Military Equipment Export Report is publicly accessible and yet remains in a strange kind of twilight. The 2A7+ is listed in the report, a device for the pacification of unrest, protests and riots in urban areas. But why does a tank have an animal's name? And what does a tank that is called leopard sound like?
"pssst Leopard 2A7+" is a sonic investigation of the public secrets concerning the tank called Leopard, which we will perhaps meet on the street in the future. Fictitious field recordings from the sites of production and operating locations, manipulated sounds from the tracked vehicle, and letters to the leopard sketch an ambivalent scenery. The apparently clearly defined features of the military vehicle are infiltrated. The animal separates itself from the tracked vehicle.
Sound needs space to develop. The artists' collective 48nord has launched an acoustic reflection on the real and imaginary resonant spaces of our society: Utopias, dystopias, heterotopias. While the first ufos are landing in the background, we are entering Michel Foucault's theoretical structure and strolling through Andrei Tarkovsky's zone. In the centre the dialectical entanglement from within and without: Sound situations next to and on top of each other. Fading away. Building up.
"It's the quietest place in the world. You'll see for yourself. It's so beautiful here. Here, there's no-one else here." (Arkady and Boris Strugatzky).
With quotations from:
"Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatzky
"Stalker" by Andrei Tarkovsky
"Of Other Spaces" by Michel Foucault
"Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt" by Christian Enzensberger
›Operation Olympic Games‹ is the name of a US Government Programme that was commissioned to develop computer viruses, Trojans and worms for intelligence services and cyberwarfare.
The artist James Hoff infected his sound material with malicious software and uses dangerous programmes with names like Stuxnet, Flame or Skywiper as composition tools. His sound miniatures, which allow us to hear the computer viruses at work, have been available since the beginning of the year in our ›Sonarisations‹ series.
Hoff outlines a speculative scenario. What does it sound like when a virus becomes independent? At the same time the work raises questions about the spread of viruses. Do not some ideas also work like viruses?
In the broadcast, James Hoff explains his fascination for injected code: »Viruses, like art, need a host. Preferably a popular one.«
Rampant linguistic structures, distorted legibility and wilful, onomatopoeic spelling. The texts by Reinhard Jirgl lead straight into the depths of language: To its form. Composer Michael Wertmüller pushes these extraction processes still further ahead: In the intrinsically acoustic the written.
"what words: !old, !example. Now they have become my words. No attenuating circumstances. No mercy. No paving the way. No gold rush. All the gold is approved for trade at cheap prices & pressed into paper like colourful autumn leaves that have fallen in the storms of the economic cycle tour. Cannot help, cannot win. So let the forest, let twilight begin." (Reinhard Jirgl)
In the dark world of the deep sea, most organisms orient themselves through their auditory system. This insight inspired the Argentinan-Mexican sound artist Sol Rezza to a phantasmagorical radio piece: Based loosely on the novel '20 000 Leagues Under the Sea' by Jules Verne, she designs a mysterious world of recordings of hydrophones and synthetic soundscapes. Please keep your headphones ready!
The project "In the Darkness of the World" was supported with a realisation grant as part of the Radio Lab from the Goethe Institut, CTM Festival, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 ORF Kunstradio, ICAS-ECAS and Deutschlandradio Kultur. A multi-channel version of the play premièred in HAU 2 at the CTM Festival on 26 January 2015.
The Ars Acustica Group of the European Broadcasting Union organised concerts in 20 cities throughout Europe for the 1,000,052nd "Art's Birthday". The Sound Art Editorial Department of Deutschlandradio Kultur participated in the event with a night in Berlin's Berghain Club. Traditional and avant-garde sound cultures came together:
1. Gilles Aubry & Robert Millis:
Jewel of the Ear
Length: 30'04
Gilles Aubry: Field Recordings & Electronics
Robert Millis: Shellac Record Player & Electronics
The storage of sounds is a product of euro-American society in the late 19th century. A whole wave of modern conservation measures spread out from here: Embalming, memorials, archives, tin cans and, not least, the phonograph. The export of such technologies to the colonies allowed conflicting ways of thinking to collide. In India, for example, the principle of fixation confronted a philosophy of ongoing renewal through the cycle of birth and death. This understanding of history is also reflected in India's classical music, in which its improvisational structures were passed on exclusively orally. Nevertheless the British tried to record and market Indian music from 1902. As a result, Indian musical tradition began to take on more constant forms.
Gilles Aubry and Robert Millis question this process in their performance "Jewel of the Ear". Shellac records of traditional Indian music meet field recordings of cremation ceremonies in the Manikarnika Temple in Varanasi. The name of the temple is the inspiration for the title of the audio piece: "Jewel of the Ear".
2. Tarek Atoui & Charbel Haber:
The Mirror Session
Length: 17'24
Tarek Atoui: Electronics
Charbel Haber: historic string instruments
The Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui also staged a transcultural and transhistorical meeting of sound languages. In doing so, he continued a project which he had begun as part of the 8th Berlin Biennial. With the title "The Dahlem Sessions", Atoui played the Berlin Phonogram Archive located in the Dahlem Ethnological Museum. Alongside thousands of musical-ethnoological recordings, the archive also houses a unique collection of musical instruments from all over the world. Over the course of several months, Atoui invited a number of musicians from the Berlin improvisation scene to recording sessions with the historic instruments.
He played the resulting material to instrument makers from different countries. They were to recreate their auditory impressions with the help of modern sound generators, which were presented in the Mexican Kurimanzutto Galerry in November under the title "Reverse Sessions". Atoui is bringing the partial results of this process back to Berlin for Art's Birthday: He uses a new type of mechanical bow to play string instruments out of the Berlin Phonogram Archive from Africa, India and South America.
3. Marcus Schmickler & Hayden Chisholm:
Too Long in This Condition
Length: 24'16
Marcus Schmickler: Electronics
Hayden Chisholm: Bagpipes
Marcus Schmickler and Hayden Chisholm are continuing their long-standing collaboration for Art's Birthday. With bagpipes and live electronics they create a phantasmagorical soundscape.
In "Too Long in This Condition" Marcus Schmickler and Hayden Chisholm explore the tradition of Piobaireachd, the Great Music. Piobaireachd (or Pibroch) is a long-established school of bagpipe music, which emerged in the Highlands of Scotland between 1500 and 1750 and initially found no form of notation due to its complex variations. Pibroch pieces were categorized according to functional and technical aspects: salutes, laments, marches and gatherings. In the music, a slow musical theme is varied extensively and at the same time furnished with embellishments. "Too Long in This Condition" is a specially composed theme, whose variations were also generated using a computer. In doing so, an indistinguishability developed between the starting point, structure and expression.
Where does the human voice begin? Where does it end? From when does a voice sound artificial? These are the questions the concept artist and music producer Lars Holdhus is examining in a series of vocal experiments. Various constellations of solo and choir voices, computers, music boxes, synthesis techniques and vocal prostheses form a diffuse sound field between human and machine vocal tracts.
In the middle of the last century some composers found classical notation too rigid and they began to experiment with musical notation. The British composer Cornelius Cardew was a pioneer in the field of graphic notation. Between 1963 and 1967 he created the composition ›Treatise‹: It consists of 193 pages of geometric and abstract shapes, modified musical symbols and numbers. The interpretation and performance of the characters remains entirely with the interpreter.
The composer Christopher Williams has merged numerous versions of Treatise in a remix and combined this with texts by Cornelius Cardew. A musical essay thus came into being on the ambiguity of notation and about a piece of music history.
Whispered messages, a gently crumpled crisps packet – for some people these sounds create a pleasant tingling in their head and spine. The subjective phenomenon is called ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). Videos containing appropriate material are now receiving the highest view counts on YouTube. They show simple scenes in which the viewer is lovingly cared for: at the hairdresser’s, the doctor’s, the psychologist’s, at your girlfriend’s. Added to this are gentle sounds like popping, crackling and rustling.
The American radio producer and computer activist Claire Tolan has adopted this practice. She has been presenting the ASMR program "You Are Worth It” on Berlin’s Community Radio since January 2014. Within the Radio Lab of the CTM Festival and Deutschlandradio Kultur, she has now developed an installation and a radio play about the great tingling. Here she connects ASMR sounds to the latest developments in acoustic surveillance technologies. She uses laser microphones to listen to herself and voluntary performers through closed windows. Her thesis: ASMR and espionage both concentrate on the same trouble area of our society – privacy. In both cases, intimacy is artificially created. Technical equipment bridges physical and emotional distances. Online exhibitionism and digital control turn out to be two sides of the same coin.
In her radio play "Always here for you", Claire Tolan combines typical scenes from the world of ASMR with fictitious bugging scenarios. The common thread running through the work is a brief introduction into knot theory. It acts as a metaphor for the contradictory intertwinement of closeness and distance in our society.
What remains of a culture? Sites, buildings, stones - doggedly they resist eternity. The sound worlds of past cultures have long died away. The young discipline of Archaeoacoustics connects the audible with the visible, the ephemeral with the permanent. It explores the hidden sound worlds of thousand-year-old sites. The finding: early cultures quite consciously shaped and formed their acoustic environment. Numerous buildings bear witness to a sophisticated game with sound effects and phenomena. The visual continues to dominate as a source of knowledge in Western sciences. Archaeoacoustics concentrates solely on hearing. Annie Goh takes part in a caving expedition with researchers Iegor Reznikoff, Rupert Till and the flautist Anna Friederike Potengowski.
Our electronic traces on the Internet have become one of the most important commodities. Governments and companies create personal profiles from the vast collections of supposedly insignificant information. ›Anticipatory Computing‹, i.e. the forecasting of possible behaviours is considered as the next logical step in this development. Computer programmes will then tell their users what they will do, want, or experience next. An attractive scenario, in particular for the creative industry which would like to use this method to forecast changes in fashions and tastes which have to date been difficult to gauge.
By analysing the freely accessible data on Deutschlandradio Kultur’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, Mathew Dryhurst speculates on listeners’ preferences and holds up a digital mirror to us.
Unlike commercial media makers, Mathew Dryhurst is however not bent on numerical success alone. He would also like to highlight the issue of the new development. This is why his radio play is not a highly polished blockbuster, but rather a multi-layered reflection on the present and the future of the media narrative.
The process of translation plays an important role here, because Dryhurst doesn’t speak German. Just like multi-national corporations or powerful intelligence services, he has used algorithms to translate his material into English. With this approach, the context is often lost and mistakes creep in.
From the resulting fragments and topics he has made a surrealist science-fiction story in English, which he has fed back onto the Internet. With the help of online portals for freelancers, he found translators and speakers to translate his text into German and record it. A patchwork of voices and styles was created, corresponding to the diversity of communication on the Internet.
The sound compositions for “Muster” ("Patterns") were created in a similar fashion. Dryhurst used software to collect all the audio files he came across during his research and extracted from them the source material for his musical work.
Short wave broadcasting is one of the primary rocks of global media culture. For decades it was the only way to receive signals from other parts of the world. This is why you can still find propaganda broadcasters and encrypted secret communications bustling about until today alongside free radio stations and underground information in its spectrum.
Short wave almost behaves like a living being in its proliferation: Depending on time of day, temperature and wind, it changes its zigzag paths between the earth’s surface and the ionosphere.
The Emptyset Duo made use of this early radio technology for a live performance on 1 February 2015 at the CTM Festival Berlin: they played a radiophonic game of ping-pong between the oldest active radio station in the world in Nauen (Brandenburg) and the French broadcaster Issoudun. From the atmospherically enriched sound a composition was created for and about radio.
The division of Germany begins and ends in the ether. Immediately after the Second World War, the Allies took over broadcasting sovereignty in their respective spheres of influence. But radio waves know no borders!
To mark the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Germany, the British Electronica producer Matthew Herbert recalls the last day of the division on the radio. Broadcasts from 2 October 1990 from both sides of the border form the foundation of a choral composition for two key institutions of German-German musical life: the RIAS Kammerchor and Rundfunkchor Berlin. These two bodies, established during the time of division, are today united under the roof of the ROC Berlin. They interpret a two-part composition, which was simultaneously broadcast on Deutschlandradio Kultur and Deutschlandfunk.
A stereo version is available for audio on demand, repetitions and acquisitions.
The Fluxus artist Ben Patterson celebrated his 80th birthday on 29 May 2014. The anniversary brought with it concerts, exhibitions, lectures and catalogues, but also an unexpected discovery: May 29 is a cunning old day!
Patterson shares this date of birth with an amazing collection of personalities: Charles II (King of England), Patrick Henry (one of America’s Founding Fathers), Sylvester Magee (the last living former slave), Isaac Albéniz, G. K. Chesterton, Oswald Spengler, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bob Hope, John F. Kennedy, Iannis Xenakis and La Toya Jackson. Incidentally, the scandalous première of Igor Stravinsky’s "The Rite of Spring” took place on 29 May 1913.
For his 81st, Ben Patterson celebrates his fellow birthday children with a furious radio performance.
Jean-Luc Godard's past is at rest in thousands of cardboard boxes. The filmmaker has stored his entire personal archive in an inconspicuous location in France. In addition to countless rolls of film and personal items, Godard’s audio tapes also rest there.
The Soundwalk Collective was given access to this archive in 2014 and now lets us take a look behind Godard's acoustic scenes: the trio has extracted the recordings before and after Godard's film takes in meticulous detail. The universe of a perfectionist and phantasmagorian is shown through director’s instructions, the atmosphere on the set, false starts and new takes.
"It is also exactly that/what I love about cinema in general/a saturation of magnificent signs bathing in the light of their absence of explanation." (Godard)
Moving homes is the musical reflection on the loss of 'Home' to a tropical cyclone. A cyclone devastates material objects: The sofa, the roof, the whole house. It can also destroy the symbolic order: Belonging, law and order. ‘Moving homes’ wants to ease this pain, firstly by offering alternative concepts of 'Home', and secondly, by accompanying and soothing the radio listener in times of crisis.
Dishes, windows and doors rattle. Parked cars shake. Unstable objects topple over. Trees sway. Walking becomes difficult. Driving becomes difficult. Fireplaces, factory chimneys, columns, monuments and walls collapse. Houses are pushed off their foundations. Underground pipelines and dams are damaged. Railway tracks are buckled. There are major landslides, the water in lakes, rivers and canals overflows its banks. Bridges are destroyed. The Earth's surface changes significantly, objects are tossed into the air, the earth’s crust moves in waves, enormous rock masses start to slide.
Have you ever heard of Xenofeminism? The manifesto from the Laboria Cubonics authors’ collective advocates receptiveness to everything foreign, new and different - and translates this into sound.
Alienation as an opportunity - this is a central message of the Xenofeminist Manifesto published by the Laboria Cubonics authors' collective in 2015: "Instead of [...] dreaming of a return to an idealized natural authenticity, Xenofeminism understands alienation as a creative impetus. We are all alienated." Xenofeminism strives for maximum openness and mobility, for the receptiveness of everything foreign, new, and different.
Everything is subject to radical change through technology: Nature, material conditions, identities, and social forms. The determinism of the natural order producing injustice should be overcome in favour of a radical diversity of genders and freedom of identities. Everyone has the right to "speak as no one in particular".
The Polish sound artist Marcin Pietruszewski searches for a sonic equivalent of these ideas in his piece. Based on a libretto by Helen Hester and Katrina Burch from Laboria Cubonics and Virginia Barratt, a member of the VNS Matrix collective, he uses computer music, psychoacoustics and speech synthesis to form a series of abstract sound articulations that interconnect poetic and technological vectors in a complex manner. A search for new sonic, conceptual, social, and political spaces.
"To glitch, sound space forks discontinuously in overlapping tendencies (matter). Our memory functions through discontinuity, by necessity fragmentation makes navigation conceivable as an act of trust, a rolling game. As pigment particularity. As thinking (as) no one in particular. Living as erratum, reconstituting as the glitch. Xenopoetic breakdown. The dissolving bestiary; the beasts have been freed from their pages.” – Excerpt from the libretto.
Composition and production: Marcin Pietruszewski
Libretto: Virginia Barratt, Katrina Burch (aka yonneda.lemma) and Helen Hester
Articulatory synthesis: Paul Boersma and David Weenink
Speech synthesis design: Marcin Pietruszewski in collaboration with the Centre for Speech Technology Design (University of Edinburgh)
The world of music has been meeting in Darmstadt since 1946: In the summer schools at the Music Institute there, everybody who is anybody, whether composer or performer, is present.
For their 70th anniversary, the summer schools took a look back and opened their archive. Under the title "historage", artists of the present day are able to access the treasure chamber of concert recordings, lectures and discussions. One of these is the electronic musician Hanno Leichtmann. For Deutschlandradio Kultur he composed his personal journey through the legacies of Stockhausen, Boulez, Ligeti and Co. His work is a collage, remix and homage at the same time. For this, he primarily used sound editing and composition methods which are heavily influenced by the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne as well as by musique concrète.
Narrators: Jörg Hartmann, David Moss
A farm house in the wilderness, a hollow in the hills, a hiding place in a dam, sleeping between blueberries and lava rocks: What gives a place its secret? What is hiding behind its vegetable or mineral architecture, its sounds, the sound of a voice that tells of it?
Iceland and Australia form the two poles of this montage of situational field recordings, interviews and musique concrète. ›Hidden places‹ deals with the state of travel, thinking, speaking in two diametrically opposed countries that have surprisingly much in common.
How do you write a history of radiophonic sound art? In order to answer this question, radio artist Colin Black spent five years travelling the world. On his journey he interviewed (almost) all of the protagonists of the genre: Artists, editors, theorists. He counterpointed their stories and thoughts with sounds from his journey. The result is a piece of radio art about radio art.
Interlocutors (in this order):
Martin Slawig, Götz Naleppa, Erik Mikael Karlsson, Ed Baxter, Andreas Hagelüken, Philippe Langlois, Alessandro Bosetti, Gregory Whitehead, Douglas Kahn, Andrew McLennan, Jean-Philippe Renoult, Dinah Bird, Virginia Madsen, Marie Wennersten, Marcus Gammel, Kaye Mortley, Armeno Alberts, Andrea Cohen, Tom Roe, Andreas Bick, Anna Friz, Hildegard Westerkamp, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Heidi Grundmann, Atau Tanaka, Teri Rueb, Galen Joseph-Hunter and John Jacobs
Narrators: Elke Utermöhlen & Martin Slawig
Giuseppe Impa Stato's life was short. Born into a Sicilian Mafia family in 1948, he turned against the Cosa Nostra while still young. He advocated communism, organized peasant protests, wrote poems. In 1976, he founded the free radio station 'Radio Aut' through which he satirised the Mafia bosses of his hometown Cinisi. He was murdered in 1978.
Collage of radio performances, poems and biographical scenes describing a brave person.
Text direction: Götz Naleppa
With: Tonio Arango, Stefan Kaminski, Eduardo Mulone
‘To gad’ means ‘to move from one location to another in an apparently random and frivolous manner’. At the same time, the abbreviation G.A.D. Stands for 'General Anxiety Disorder'. Discontinuity and anxiety are typical symptoms of liquefaction in an era of extreme technocapitalism. That at least is claimed by the artist Marija Bozinovska Jones and composer JG Biberkopf.
Their radio play “G.A.D. Technologies” is about the liquefaction of human subjectivity in an era of globalised technocapitalism. Factors such as nationality, gender, profession or ethnicity are increasingly dissolving and becoming caught up in a maelstrom of mobility and flexible usability.
“The citizens of the liquefied state find themselves in the force field between two poles. On the one hand, borders are washed away with the prospect of large-scale democratization, on the other hand, industry and politics are working to recreate and control precisely these borders using technical algorithms.” (Marija Bozinovska Jones)
The piece is divided into three sections: Liquid state / Heterotopia ; Fast Forward / Dystopia ; and Optimizing Zen / Utopia.
The crucial question for Jones and Biberkopf is: Will the increasingly rapid change plunge us into deep mental crises, or can we establish a new, more flexible form of identity? Can we face up to liquefaction without drowning?
‘GAD Technologies' won one of the two production prizes from Deutschlandradio Kultur and CTM Festival Berlin at Radio Lab 2016.
“What would I be without the Internet?” The Tunisian DJane Deena Abdelwahed asks herself. Her answer is a radio performance with elements from radio plays and club music. She tells of the conflict between the Tunisian "Generation Y" and their parents, of the precariousness of youthful identities between Islam and Internet.
‘All Hail Mother Internet' won one of the two production prizes from Deutschlandradio Kultur and CTM Festival Berlin at Radio Lab 2016.
Translation: Julia Tieke
With excerpts from the Tunisian Constitution and the book "Murderous Identities" by Amin Maalouf
Contributors: Adyan Al-Zohaery, Ayad Al-Zohaery, Hanan El-Ali, Manuela Oforiatta, Antye Greie and Deena Abdelwahed
Text recordings: Hermann Leppich
Deutschlandradio Kultur beteiligt sich am „Art’s Birthday 2016“ mit einem Konzert in der Schaubühne Lindenfels, Leipzig.
Unter dem Motto „100 Jahre Dada“ feiern zeitgenössische Klangkünstler die Aktualität der Kunstströmung, die 1916 in Zürich begann.
Der japanische Komponist und Vokalperformer Tomomi Adachi setzt sich seit über 10 Jahren mit der Geschichte des japanischen Dadaismus auseinander. Schon zu Beginn der 20er Jahre gelangte die Strömung aus Zürich in die japanische Kulturszene, wo sie auf fruchtbaren Boden fiel. In dem fernöstlichen Kaiserreich waren Militarismus, nationalistische Engstirnigkeit und Zensur ebenso verbreitet wie im Europa des 1. Weltkrieges. Künstler und Schriftsteller wie Tsuji Jun, Takahashi Shinkichi, Murayama Tomoyoshi und die MAVO-Gruppe nahmen Impulse aus Europa auf und bildeten eine kleine aber eigenständige Dadaszene. Ausgehend von Originaltexten des japanischen Dada entwickelt Tomomi Adachi für den „Art’s Birthday“ eine musikalische Lecture Performance, die den dadaistischen Ost-West-Dialog aktualisiert. Begleitet wird er dabei von der amerikanisch-chinesischen Vokalistin Audrey Chen und von einem 20-köpfigen Laienchor.
Audrey Chen, geboren 1976 in Chicago, lebt in Berlin als Cellistin und Vokalistin der improvisierten Musik. In jüngster Zeit arbeitete sie vor allem mit Phil Minton, Maria Chavez und dem Konzeptkünstler John Bock.
Deutschlandradio Kultur participated in “Art's Birthday 2016” with a concert at the Schaubühne Lindenfels, Leipzig.
Under the motto “100 years of Dada”, contemporary sound artists celebrate the current state of the art movement that began in Zurich in 1916.
Michael Wertmüller (drums), Michael Lentz (text, voice, saxophone) and Gunnar Geisse (guitar & electronics) pick up the linguistic and intellectual force of Dadaism. Wertmüller is known for his high energy and simultaneously precise drumming. For the first time at the concert, he meets the sound poet and writer Michael Lentz, whose musical text compositions, find the roots not least in the radically playful Dada lyricism. The set-up is supplemented by guitarist and composer Gunnar Geisse.
Voice and Saxophone: Michael Lentz
Laptop guitar: Gunnar Geisse
Drums: Michael
Texts by Michael Lentz, Raoul Hausmann, Kurzt Schwitters, Tom Johnson
Sound: Uwe Lauschke and Thomas Monnerjahn
Adventurous language games, exuberant chains of association and luxuriant cascades of words: Johann Fischart’s ‘Affentheurlich Naupengeheurliche Geschichtklitterung’ from 1575 preempted literary modernism by centuries. The Strasbourg poet relies on the sound of words and focusses on a network of absurd and pseudo-etymological linkages. From Modern High German language excess, the musician Reinhold Friedl has created a radio play which exposes the phonetic and linguistic structures.
“So hört nun, Ihr meine Orenspitzige und offenmaulvergessene Zuhörer”. (Johann Fischart)
Composition and realisation: Reinhold Friedl based on a text by Johann Fischart
Speakers: Bernhard Schütz, Maurice de Martin, Andreas Harder, Thomas Herbst, Elsa Kammerer, Max Knoth, Georg Mariot, Sabine Schall, Wolfgang Tschöke, Christian Wittman, Georg Zeitblom
Musicians: p.o.p. psychology of perception: Elena Kakaliagou (Horn), Nora Krahl (cello), Hannes Strobl (electric bass), Reinhold Friedl (piano), Cantantes a pueris Berlin – Conductor Vinzenz Weissenburger
Sound and Engineering: Hermann Leppich and Philipp Adelmann
Two Indians stumble into a concert of the Darmstadt Summer School in 1958. From that time on, one of them will never let go of electronic music again. Back in India, he buys oscillators and filters, his friend lends him a tape recorder. Under the name Dhvanivala (dealer or sounds specialist), he recorded numerous tapes. His pieces are made up of
field recordings and electronic sounds, he calls them sutras (formulas).
When he disappears without trace in 1967, his old friend is only left a box of cassettes. And then these recordings also go missing. In India’s intellectual scene, the sound art pioneer Dhvanivala is today considered a mythical figure. The son of his friend, now a composer himself, sets out to find the lost sutras.
Cast: Ingo Hülsmann (Narrator), Judith Engel (Scientist), Meriam Abbas (Sutras), Fabian
Raabe (Sutras), Olaf Oelstrom (Ranjit Hoskote)