Soundwalkers

Half hour documentary from Raquel Castro about sound and listening featuring interviews with Christoh Cox, Janek Schaefer, Peter Cusack, Rafael Toral, Sabine Breitsameter and many others. I liked the story about a young mother who used sound to communicate with her downstair neighbour, an old lady she didn’t liked because the lady controlled her comings [...]

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David Lang composes Soundtrack for (UNTITLED)

New Music (with the capital letter “N” indicating contemporary classical music…) grapples with broad public ignorance and clichés of solitary self-indulgent composers writing scores that sound like noise to the rest of the world. The film (UNTITLED) plays with these clichés and centers its story around young composer Adrian who falls [...]

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German TV doesn’t break bad

Why is German TV so bad, most of the time, even though we have public broadcasting services that should be able to develop at least some formats of high social relevance and artistic value? Maybe because we lack the political and social issues that the U.S. has to struggle with. Take [...]

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Classic goes Clubbing

Just returned from a lovely evening of comtemporary music played by a string quartet and a percussionist on various acoustic and electronic gadgets at C3-Festival at Berlins notorious club Berghain. There seems to be a “trend”, by some called “neo-classic” or “modern classical/electronic music”, that follows the intercourse of classically trained musicians and composers with [...]

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Phonographic Pottery

The first podcast I heard from radiolab, a programme at New York based public radio station WNYC, was called staying alive. When it comes to the point where a scientist claims that he can play back voices from thousand years ago captured in the grooves of ancient pottery with a stylus like an old grammophone-type [...]

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Constantin Popp remixes Tagesringe

Constantin Popp made this beautiful “remix” of my piece “Tagesringe”, basically he played around with some granular features and boosted the noisy parts of the piano track without the field recordings of the original composition.

For more information and free download of the original version of “Tagesringe” check my website.
Constantin just finished his diploma thesis on [...]

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Silent Film and Foley Artists

Did you know that the lack of sound in silent film was not a question of technological limitations but an aesthetic decision? If you don’t, check the guys at You Look Nice Today who produced a nice video to honor the early foley artists who embraced the “purity of silence”…

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The Future in one Day

Rushing over the Biennale in Venice and trying to grasp most of its art exhibits in one day lets your receptors overfire at one stage. It could sound like this recording that is a detail of an installation of Rosa Barba named “The future last one day” comprised of several film projectors running at varying [...]

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Breath in the Pieces of Czech Composer Michal Rataj

Breath is at the same time a bodily necessity and an expression of emotions, of desires, fears and disquitude, feelings that are often concealed under a blanket of words. For Czech composer Michal Rataj, breath represents the fantastic conjunction of gesture, rhythm and intonation. He writes about his latest electroacoustic composition “I’m more vain than [...]

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The Waste Land at Venice Biennale

Ismael Ivo’s latest dance choreography „the waste land“ was premiered in Venice  on 20th June 2009. The first two performances were a great success and the Biennale scheduled two extra performances on 29th and 30th June. The choreography lasts for about an hour and is devided in two halfs marked by the compositions of mine [...]

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