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 sound diffusion and the role of the sound engineer as an acousmatic interpreter of a composition who helps the composer to accomplish all his intentions in a certain spatial, and sometimes sonically difficult situation. The paper is in German. Check his homepage for other stuff, the piece “ruhig” for instance is a nice example for his electroacoustic compositions. Constantin assists Robin Minard on his projects and I also had the pleasure to assure his help on editing and denoising many clock ticking recordings during my work on”Chronostasis“.
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”…
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 speeds and screening evocative word fragments around the visitor.
As the film is running at high speed through ones consciousness it slows down at certain times when the overwhelming scope of this years Biennale offers little gems and islands of contemplation. The Biennale is everything in one: sometimes boring, modiocre, infuriating, partly brilliant, thought-provoking, irritating, reflecting the modern world as it is, I suppose. Reading through reviews in the guardian, the telegraph or in Texte zur Kunst, it is easy to understand that our world is as scattered and disintegrated as our reception of art in general. This is not too bad at all. My inner film was even set to another contrasting speed when I visited the new exhibition space at Punta della Dogana by French billionaire Francois Pinault who showcasts his pompous and intimidating collection at one of Venice most central spots to overtrump the Biennale with his sense for spacious and expensive art objects. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan left one of the lasting images at the Biennale with his dead art collector swimming head over in his pool, only to re-appear at Pinault’s collection with his taxidermy-horse sticking out of a wall. It would be intersting to check in 10 years time which artists of this years Biennale will have made it into the universe of Pinault’s prestige craving.
To get to the Art Biennale of Venice the way to go is usually by a waterbus, the so called vaporetto. The vaporetto station at Biennale is particularly noisy as one section of this sound recording mix can bear witness. The swimming stations are connected to the waterfront with metal bridges that swing up and down with the waves coming in, causing high screaking sounds. Vaporetti themselves make fascinating sounds when they are tied together in rows of 5 or 6 boats at night time. They bump into each other with the waves and the deep tones of this bumbing can be heard occasionally when strolling down the promenade of Riva degli Schiavoni from Arsenale back to Piazza San Marco at late hours. I even sneaked onto the resting boats to capture some of the sounds featured in this little collage of vaporetti noises. The ropes with which the boats are moored together produce a rhythmical texture that translates the incoming waves into a sonic pattern that is quite appealing. To hear a more tranquile version of vaporetti sounds, also check the beautiful recordings of Enrico Coniglio at touch radio that he did not far from where I recorded.
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 the wind“: “It is all in my breath, that which I am not able to formulate properly with words, what my words just cannot make. It is as if I hope breath will carry my information further, safely, better. There is faith, hope, desire and sadness in a breath too…”. In another beautiful composition called “dreaming life” Michal based the piece on a recording of his sleeping daughter breathing at night. In his words: “I fetched a microphone, recorded the child’s breathing from very close up, and then worked with the sound as with a musical instrument, i.e. using resonance filters, I tuned it, and instrumented it in what was in practice a traditional manner. Whatever the combination the sound is used in, you can always feel that physiological rhythm of breathing in it, even despite the fact that the other (let us say harmonic parameters) of the sound have essentially vanished. And I chose this distant sense of breathing deliberately in the attempt to draw the listener away to places where reality and dream permeate each other, where we are not sure whether we are dreaming or awake… hence the title – dreaming life.” (taken from a very informative interview Michal gave to the czech music quarterly). All of his electroacoustic compositions bear an exquisite sensitivity for sound and its underlying musicality. Maybe it is because Michal is both a trained composer who frequently writes chamber and orchestra pieces and is at the same time an expert in computer based composing techniques, thus his works are always structurally and conceptually concise and focussed. In the context of electroacoustic music he offers a very personal approach of dealing with musique concrète not as some kind of pure abstract essence but giving the audience a certain narrativity. Semantic aspects of sounds are not completely abandoned but stylized and recontextualized, the original sounds stay clearly recongnizable and therefore the listener has the opportunity to conduct his or her own “reading” of Michals abstract sound stories and to step into ones own internal dialogue with his poetic creations.
My recent sound piece „chronostasis“ has received a Silver World Medal in the category „Best Sound“ and a finalist certificate in the category „Best Editing“ at the prestigious New York Festivals Awards for Radio Programming & Promotion. The composition was commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk for Studio Akustische Kunst presented by Markus Heuger. For 52 years the New York Festivals Radio Programming and Promotions Awards has recognized The World’s Best Work in radio broadcasting judged for their production values, organization, creativity and use of the medium. The full list of winners can be viewed in this pdf.
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 and Igor Stravinskys „Sacre du Printemps“. During the first half the dancers turn their backs to the audience and move separated from each other in tight borders of squares described by the light. The bodies appear to be twitching, lonely parts of flesh exposed to archaic natural forces, symbolized by the ice and fire sounds of mine. After half an hour the dancers step in front of the stage and for the first time the audience can see their faces. In this moment the first notes of Stravinskys „Sacre“ come in to great effect representing the beginning of civilization and the rise of culture that finally formed out of a long evolutionary process as characterized in the first half of the choreography. Ismael then wisely avoids to illustrate each musical nuance of Stravinskys legendary piece, the audience is given the chance to re-experience the physical strength and power of the composition after half an hour of concrete sounds and so do the dancers who linger on the rim of the stage with closed eyes like newborn babies, the gummed up eyes trying to get attuned to the bright light. From this point on the choreography speeds up and becomes more and more complex, typical conflicts of human relationships are suggested, pairs and groups build, break up and re-build in new configurations. The peak of the piece is an oil fountain that bathes the dancers in black muddy liquid in which the bodies celebrate their last animistic feast.
I’m currently working on a TV film score with a story line dealing with illegal african immigrants in Germany. To give the african characters a certain “ethno” tone, the director and me decided to work with this big “wok” thing that he saw lying around here, which is in fact a hanghang or better know as the hang drum. This instrument, invented in 2000 by Swiss instrument makers Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer of Panart, has since its inauguration drawn unexpected worldwide demand and caused the little workshop of both inventors in Bern to restrict their output to a limited amount. Today one has to set his name on a long waiting list to eventually get hold of a new hang one day. The instrument is now in its third generation and the instrument makers recently announced in a statement via the hangblog that they would open the “Hangbauhaus” again for people to pick their hang (the somehow esoteric sound of the statement makes me shiver though…). My instrument is a first generation hang with a so called “Hitzazkiar” tuning, a persian scale with the tone row A3, D4, Eb4, F#4, G4, A4, Bb4, C#5 and D5. I’m quite fond of this tuning since it is a bit more “spicy” and has more in-build tension than normal pentatonic tunings. The hang unfortunatly has been spoiled too often lately in cheap harmonious world-music-kitsch clichees, since it is very easy to tap on a hang and produce charming consonant sound patterns without big effort. I believe the potential of the instrument has still not been fully explored, apart from brilliant musicians like Manu Delago, who had millions of people watching him on youtube playing on two hangs here.
For my filmmusic work I have multisampled my own instrument in order to be able to play it chromatically. There are two sample libraries on the market, one is by sonic couture and the other is included in east west’s stormdrums 2 library. The latter has a better sound than the former but is only restricted to the actual tones of a pentatonic scale, so I always miss some additional tones to produce a bit more tension and harmonic dissonance. My own samples are not played with the hands but with some timpani mallets that produce a somewhat softer sound in my opinion. It is great for laying out ideas on the keyboard without setting up microphones and checking out how the hang could work in the mix. As a background sound those samples do a good job, but if I intend to use the hang as a center instrument I would always invite a good percussionist to my studio to get the best out of the instrument. The rich overtone structure of each tone on a hang causes samples played in another scale than the original “Hitzazkiar” tuning to interfere with the resonances of the other notes and lead to a somehow “dirty” feeling. But you can check out my EXS instrument that I posted on my homepage if you work with Logic and would like to give it a try. Click on the download button, then unzip the file and copy the sample instrument into the folder “Sampler Instruments” located in the Logic folder. If you have problems with that, drop me a mail and we can try to figure it out. Finally here is a more unknown video of Manu Delago playing the song “Maria door een doornwoud trad” on three hangs:
My new homepage is now online with heaps of listening examples, free downloads and texts. It is actually working like a blog with RSS feed and all the web 2.0 extras. Just put it in your feedreader and you will be able to follow it in the same way you did here. I will continually mirror the content of both the silent listening blog and my new homepage with the only difference that my homepage is bilingual and has all the writings in my native german language as well. I also think that on the new page it is much more convenient to listen to the sound examples because we worked hard on an audio player that opens while browsing to other pages with uninterrupted sound. Jens and Sebastian at filesharing did a great job redesigning the new page and providing a super slick CMS that makes it very easy for me to update the content. Check the new page out here. To celebrate the new design I have made my piece “Tagesringe” available as a free download.
Ismael Ivo invited me to work on a sound composition for his new choreography “The Waste Land” that will be premièred on 20th June 2009 at Venice Biennale. On Friday and Saturday I spent time with Ismael, his very friendly staff and the dancers at their rehearsals at Teatro Piccolo Arsenale to develop a sound composition for the first half of the dance piece. The second half will be Stravinsky’s Sacre Du Printemps and it is Ismael’s idea to relate to new forms of slavery and the exploitation of natural resources which earth responds in unpredictable ways. This vulnerable and shrinking planet will be represented through my sound recordings of volcanos, glaciers and breaking ice, that are composed according to the movements of the dancers. In fact, the composition will turn out to be a very condensed version of my radioart piece “fire and frost pattern“. Stravinsky’s Sacre, then, stands for the human reaction: the physical body in a ceremony of survival and confrontation. I’m looking forward to hear how the confrontation of my sound piece with Stravinsky’s classic turns out, but I imagine it will be very effective to wait for more than half an hour for the first “real” musical tone and that this might give the Sacre even more strength.
I’m Andreas Bick. I compose and I work with sound. This is my acoustic notebook. You can find my thoughts about books and CDs I like and some sound recordings I did on the way. (I also practise my english writing skills here, so excuses for the mistakes I make...) Silent listening is about the fringes of music, the periphery where music turns into sheer sound - concrete, wild, sometimes stunningly beautiful.
Visit me at www.andreas-bick.de.
I’m Andreas Bick. I compose and I work with sound. This is my acoustic notebook. You can find my thoughts about books and CDs I like and some sound recordings I did on the way. (I also practise my english writing skills here, so excuses for the mistakes I make...) Silent listening is about the fringes of music, the periphery where music turns into sheer sound - concrete, wild, sometimes stunningly beautiful.
Visit me at 