Binaural Audio Version
Premiered as 4 channel version at eviMus Festival 2021
05.11.2021 KuBa Saarbrücken
Every second new specks of dust cover every surface imaginable. Scratches, stains and cracks accumulate in our apartment, on the walls and our objects. Most of them are hidden in plain sight, they are often obvious but we choose not to see them, maneuver our eyes around them. We start to accept them in our lives like a collection of imperfections until we may choose to fix or clean up some of them.
“Grit” is based on improvisations with a modular synthesizer including a granular synthesis engine. A joystick-controller was used to find positions where the synth produced imperfect or unexpected sounds like scratches, crackles and rumbling. The input to the granular synth varies between synthesized material and vocal sounds.
The recorded improvisations were then cut up, categorized and arranged into three parts. The first part starts with fragmented bursts, rhythmic clicking and ringing, diffuse rumbling. The sounds are spatially scattered around the room. In the second part, a storm of wind-like vocal sounds, gurgling and hissing emerges while the sounds move dynamically. The storm calms down and the sound starts to break up into fragments again, but only low noise and rumbling is left, the movement turns static.
The video tries to capture these ideas but also provides room for associations and contrast, it brings another layer of movement, colours and textures and thus completes the piece as a whole. Maybe it inspires to look around at the things surrounding us and deliberately finding and appreciating all the imperfections.