Jan Wegmann

If one deals with the history of devices for music reproduction, then one is soon in the midst of the history of electronic music and the cultural history of human hearing. With their piece LONGEST CONCERT, Hamburg composer Dong Zhou and her multimedia team make the music-playing devices themselves speak and feel. They tell stories of format change or change in music use: how would today’s music players feel about their predecessors? Would they perhaps make better choices for the planet if they designed the next generation devices themselves?

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on the search for something yet to be lost

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Over the course of the last 100 years, many technologies for audio listening and preservation have emerged. Many have become obsolete; some still stick around. There’s a constant discussion to shut down FM radio for good and replace it completely with the digital DAB+ alternative. However, that has yet to happen.

The piece explores the sounds of radio stations and the spaces between them to find something of value. In the same way black light is sometimes used as a forensic tool, as a way to search for hidden clues. The piece searches for new sounds, old sounds and blurs the lines of the immediate and the past. By playing audio files from a computer computer through a transistor radio, it creates a conversation between times. With the help of an FM transmitter, sounds will are fed in from an external source on a specific frequency. A microphone records the radio output, processes it, and plays it back again. This creates a layer of confusion between what is really live and what is played back.

The performer has multiple ways of manipulating and changing the sound. With the controls of the radio, the frequency wheel, switching between the frequency bands. But also by changing the length and position of the antenna and by moving the black light tubes around the radio and interfering with the radio waves.