Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectation. These secondary objects are called hrönir ... Until recently, the hrönir were the accidental products of distraction and forgetfulness ...
Jorge Luis Borges
Als Neozoen (aus dem Griechischen: neon - neu, zoon - Lebewesen) bezeichnet man Tierarten, die direkt oder indirekt durch die Wirkung des Menschen in andere Gebiete eingeführt worden sind und sich dort fest etabliert haben.
Der übergeordnete Begriff in der Invasionsbiologie lautet Neobiota.
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neoZoen ist zusammen mit der autoaktiven Klanginstallation Neophyta für das Festival XVII. Zepernicker Randspiele zum Thema "Genesis" entstanden und gleichzeitig ein Beitrag zum Charles-Darwin-Jahr 2009.
stereo demo
One might say that the concept 'game' is a concept with blurred edges.
- "But is a blurred concept a concept at all?" -
Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all?
Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one?
Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Encounters" is an 8-channel computer music composition where technical and compositional models from the early years of electro-acoustic music have been applied to another aesthetics. This piece is (almost) entirely based on impulses and resonance filters. The overall structure and the values of the impulse, filter and spatial parameters are derived from an all-interval-series and prime numbers. The parts of "Encounters" seem to be static at first sight but there are always barely noticeable alterations. This is a piece about time and surface.
"Encounters" has been selected for SoundLAB VI - soundPOOL: sound.newmediaserver.org/sl6/feature06.html
stereo demo
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams
"agrajag" was composed for the 16 channel loudspeaker setup of the "Fünf+1" concerts at the Kleiner Wasserspeicher in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg which were organized by the Elektronisches Studio der TU-Berlin and the DAAD Berlin. The sounds were previously recorded at the same site.
sound example:
Act five:
In the fields of Thrace, surrounded by the animals and slowly oncoming trees, Orfeo laments the final loss of Euridice.
"L'eco d'Orfeo" has been included in the DEGEM CD9 "ORPHEUS 400" released by Cybele Records.
sound example:
I wrote this piece on the occasion of the 15th edition of the festival Randspiele (an annual festival for contemporary music near Berlin). According to the main theme in 2007 - "news from the accordion" - I took some sounds which are related to the sound production principles in this instrument: noises of a jews harp, a kalimba and vibrating rulers ("free reeds") as well as air pumps. The german word "durchschlagend" refers to free reeds ("durchschlagende Zungen") but has also meanings like "penetrating", "punching through". Some real accordion notes act as a frame of this piece.
sound example:
"Jazvuk" was composed on commision by a Czech radio station for their program PremEdice Radioatelier.
Ausgangsmaterial waren eine Sprachaufnahme des bekannten tschechischen Zungenbrechers "Strc prst skrz krk" (Sprecherin: Lenka Župková) sowie mehrere Außenaufnahmen, die ich im April 2007 in den belebten Strassen von Prag gemacht habe. Den fast nur aus geräuschhaften Phonemen bestehenden tschechischen Satz zerlegte ich in Einzellaute, aus denen ich mit Hilfe granularer Resynthese jeweils kleine verschiedene charakteristische Klangszenen entwickelte. So entstanden um jedes der 4 Worte die Abschnitte des Stückes. Die realen Strassengeräusche, die vor allem durch das vielsprachige Stimmengewirr der Touristen gekennzeichnet sind, verschieben sich immer wieder zu surrealen Klanglandschaften aus den Sprachlauten.
Ein Spiel mit realen und imaginären Klangräumen, akustischen Perspektiven und Distanzen.
An excerpt of "Jazvuk" has been included in the Radio Art Compilation Deep Wireless 5 which was produced by New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) as part of the Deep Wireless festival in May 2008.
sound example:
This piece is based on short fragments of a lecture by Erwin Schroedinger. The Austrian physicist Schroedinger, one of the inventors of quantum physics, got very popular due to his thought experiment with a cat in a closed box in which he tried to illustrate the superposition of quantum states. Coupled to the state of a decaying atom (via a Geiger counter and a flask of acid) the cat is after a while both dead and still alive according to the superposition of the two possible states of that unstable atom.
Only a collapse of the wave function of this system - caused by an observer or by the influence of the macroscopic environment - could release the poor cat of its indecisive state.
Originally this piece has been composed for the wave field synthesis system of the TU-Berlin.
For concert performances in other venues there is also a quadrophonic version.
stereo demo:
"Expression" is the title of the last piece on the last record of the same name that John Coltrane has recorded together with his quartet shortly before he died in 1967. This title was chosen by himself. When he was asked to add explanatory texts about the pieces on that album he answered:
with absolutely no notes. (...) By this point I don’t know what else can be said in words about what I’m doing. Let the music speak for itself.
stereo demo:
The sounds that I have used in this piece are recordings of vibrating "tongues". In musical acoustics the German word "Zunge" (tongue) is a basic term for single and double reeds in woodwinds, like oboe, clarinet or saxophone, as well as reeds or vibrating plates in the accordion, harmonica, jews harp or some organ pipes. Even the lips of a brass player or the human vocal cords can be regarded as "vibrating tongues". The resonance frequency of these reeds and lips determines, sometimes in connection with a coupled cavity or a tube, the pitch that we will hear. The vocal cords, the vocal tract and the tongue are the basis for the production of different vowels, consonants and varying pitches - physical fundament of speech and singing and thus of music. According to the generally recognized theory of evolution the language and the speech production tools were developed to get the human race a survival advantage.
Is music a result of natural selection?
Is there a connection between art and evolution?
The linguist Stephen Pinker suggests that music is auditory cheesecake.
The title Rondeaux Trouvés ("found rondos") refers both to the concept of the "objet trouvé" ("found object") in Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète and to the trouvères or troubadours ("inventors") in France in the middle age who were poets, composers and singers in one, usually writing and singing love songs in honour of a noble lady.
In this piece I employed aspects of different musical forms of the rondeau (partly taken from compositions by the mediaval french trouvères Adam de la Hale and Jehannot de Lescurel) and simple periodical and cyclical movements in order to organize and structure various sounds: recordings of some "rotating" objects as well as vocal and instrumental round dances from Brittany, France.
All sound objects are almost everytime in spatial motion - rotating or oscillating. They move slowly and together as one in groups or blocks or very fast but independent allowing the appearance of a spatial texture instead of the sensation of singular movements.
Rondeaux Trouvés received a honorable mention at the 4th Concurso Internacional de Música Eletroacústica de São Paulo 2001 and was published on the CD Música Maximalista Vol.8.
The work was realized entirely with an Apple PowerMacintosh 8500 and the ProTools harddisk recording system. For the sound processing I've mainly used SuperCollider2 and sometimes SoundHack running MacOS9. The primary treatments besides the usual editing techniques were filtering, convolution, layering and spacial distribution and movement.
stereo demo:
The piece deals with the idea of response as an archetype in music and physics. and develops mono- , dia- and multilogues on different levels of space and time.