Adventurous Music from Germany (2015)
Grischa Lichtenberger – La Demure; Il y a péril en la demure
»LA DEMEURE; il y a péril en la demeure« is the opening to a five-part complex of works by artist Grischa Lichtenberger. »LA DEMEURE« – the residence – could be outlined as intimacy, a symbol of isolation and privacy: the joy of being withdrawn from economic, temporal or social restraints in the confinement of a home. It owes gratitude to a protective otherness, a hospitality that leaves a trace in all the works deriving from this freedom. The double bind of an enabling retreat (la demeure) and the remaining (demeurer) trace of this otherness in it generates the central tension of »LA DEMEURE; il y a péril en la demure«.
The single tracks on »LA DEMEURE; il y a péril en la demeure« and their components are constantly ruptured, disassembled and reassembled again. Some passages allude to a weird fractured version of pop music, others may evoke associations to a disjointing music box, to something mechanical that is not working as it should. The time signatures of the tracks are constantly subjected to a mangling and squelching process, all the while keeping a constant rhythmical flow.
In his very own way, Grischa Lichtenberger is examining limits, new experiences and unfulfilling expectations. This unfilteredness and rawness, the lack of a target group the music is made for, is what is fascinating about this record. »LA DEMEURE; il y a péril en la demeure« thus becomes a luxurious-kafkaesque collection of materials, an uncensored archive of a seeker.
Gregory Büttner – Wenn uns jemand hört – sag – wir haben einfach kurz Luft geschnappt
The basic sounds of the piece are sinus waves, digital crackles and white noise. This sounds I played back over different external loudspeakers, which I prepared with resonant objects like tin cans, tubes, wooden boxes to add some natural acoustics. Pure sinus waves without any overtones reacted with the physical characteristics of a tin can or white noise be filtered by the resonance chamber of a plastic tube. This mixture of acoustic and electro acoustic sounds I re-record and composed to a final piece.The CD version is a special composition of the music for the audioplay/installation “Echolot 1# Skipping Spaces” 2011 by Anja Winterhalter.
Volker Hennes – Emperor Ambassador
An exciter slowly glides down a tilted and unstretched drumhead which is affixed with a contact microphone whose signal is sent back to the exciter. Each kind of drumhead determines the distinct motion and response of the exciter, resulting in particular gliding speeds, feedback frequencies, dynamics and tonal progression. The gliding procedure on each drumhead is repeated and superimposed up to 20 times.
Atom™ and Jacek Sienkiewicz – Zero Time Collapsing
Atom™ and Jacek Sienkiewicz each performed their own solo ambient/experimental sets at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw on the 10th of August 2014. Taking advantage of the situation, they decided to play an improvised joint set towards the end of the evening which was recorded and later edited into the version now presented. Musically, both artists explored the abstract realms of textures and soundscapes, going back and forth between tonal and atonal improvisations.
Consequently, given the catalogue number “No. 906” it was placed in “No.”s well established 900 series. The 27 minute piece, even though dwelling in rather dark atmospheres, manages to establish a positively hypnotising and, some may say “psychedelic”, effect. Certainly describing zero time collapsing, the way it had taken place, for some, in Warsaw on that very day.
Release on No. A platform for audio adventures curated by Atom™ & Material Object. Home of No. Ware. Based in Santiago De Berlin.
Thomas Brinkmann – What You Hear is What You Hear
Thomas Brinkmann is renowned for audio works that hover amongst forms such as techno, minimalism and ambient. Alongside such pioneering works as ‘Klick’, ‘Variations’ and last years duo with Oren Ambarchi ‘The Mortimer Trap’, ‘What You Hear (Is What You Hear)’ Brinkmann moves further to separate his art, not only from descriptive musical terms that oppress creative output, but also removing the individual or the notion of an author from the act of creation. The 11 tracks on display form a series of self perpetuating rhythms which exist more as sound structures than any kind of traditional sound forms. Any associations, emotions and reactions are purely in the reasoning of the listener as the artist makes a strong and deliberate move away from intent. This is a strident development in the conceptual thinking of Brinkmann’s solid career, one which places the listener simultaneously inside and outside objective parameters. Dedicated to Zbigniew Karwkowski.
‘Solo’ [SLP016] is the Slip debut of Berlin-based Andreas Dzialocha. Lilting electric bass melodies are refracted through a tangled network of live computer processing. ‘Solo’‘s ruptured nocturnes are intimate duets between instrument and machine, with Dzialocha eloquently responding to randomised pulsing reverbs, filters, and compressors, which snatch his delicate motifs into virtual space in real time.
Andreas studied art history, musicology, and computer science, and is founder and director of Berlin-based Serenus Zeitblom Oktett, and upstart publishing platform BLATT 3000.
‘Solo’ is available in a limited tape run, housed in a filter-foam case designed by Susie Whaites, and accompanied by a tracing-paper poster and insert artwork by Rian Treanor.
Phantom Horse – Different Forces
Different Forces is the second album by Hamburg-based duo Phantom Horse, following their acclaimed self-titled album debut on Dekorder. These polyrhythmic vehicles are driven under the influence of Cluster and Harmonia, that venerable school of out-there German explorers; the tuneful ghost of Moondog can also be seen on the rear-view mirror, while the landscape rushes by with the hypnotic pulse of 1960’s Minimalism.
Berlin electronic duo Driftmachine’s new tape is called ‘Eis Heauton’ – a Greek term for being in ‘a conversation with oneself’. This reference highlights the fact that Driftmachine is not composing music in a classical sense here, as they did on their debut album ‘Nocturnes’(Umor Rex 065).
Instead, three of the four tracks have been developed from so-called self-generating patches: the duo of Florian Zimmer (Saroos) and Andreas Gerth (Tied & Tickled Trio) were only framing technical parameters and subsequently let their modular system talk in its very own musical language. The self-generating patches recorded here can be understood as a transcript of those machine-produced monologues, as well as artistic research By evoking a ghostly presence of modular synthesis, the duo find traces of individuality inside their machines. ‘Eis Heauton’ exhibits a strange and haunting musical cosmos, a signature that is always present within Driftmachine’s live shows.
Michael Trommer – Berlin Anamnetic
“Berlin Anamnetic is the outcome of a two-month residency at Berlin’s ZK/U (Centre for Art and Urbanistics). It seeks to integrate the ‘real’ acoustic soundscape with the embodied, imagined soundtrack evoked by a particular time and place.
The working process for this series involved long walks, generally from the outlying regions of Berlin to the city centre; these were documented via audio recordings, photos, and notes. Particular attention was placed on locations of emotional resonance, whether the source of this resonance was historical, personal or serendipitous. The associated sound files were then subjected to extensive spectral processing, melding the mnemonic soundtrack (usually overheard pop songs or earworms) with the real (diegetic) soundtrack. As such, sounds were structured in a quasi-painterly fashion rather than arranged in a more conventional linear time-line (i.e. in a DAW such as Ableton, etc.). Correspondingly, the pieces that comprise ‘Berlin Anamnetic’ also seek to adopt a narrative form that is textural and emotive, eschewing typical narrative structure for something that is more akin to the body’s ‘real’ movement through a landscape.”
Stefan Militzer and Roland Etzin – O/live
The world is constantly vibrating. There is a swinging in the air. Rivers flow and so does blood. Even the ground is moving from time to time under massive strokes of energy. The travel of energy happens in waves and by vibration. Thus, the beating of a heart appears to have a similar shape like the way energy travels through oceans and continents. The omnipresence of waves equals the power musical oscillation possesses for expressing energy. This energy does not only travel around the world but it bears what the world consists of. The ubiquity of energy, of vibration and oscillation also lies behind John Cage’s observation that true silence can only be found in death.
“Nachtstücke is the upshot of an “entropic process”, as we’re cryptically told by Stephan Mathieu. At four hours and twenty minutes of duration, the work is ambitiously hinting at the “installation-at-home” status, surpassing by a marine mile the obsolescence of commonly regarded “ambient”. Given the latent chaos connected to the very concept of entropy, the discernment of an opposite result – namely, the “awareness of the useless” that leads to internal quietness – is reassuring. Subsonic throbs, sempiternal drones, nerve-soothing frequencies, implied grief and a general sense of closeness to the actual core of ultimate intuition are all fundamental stations in this journey. (Massimo Ricci)