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?

on the search for something yet to be lost

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.

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CUBICLE #2 in Hamburg and Berlin

Composition: Orestis Papaioannou
Multimedia: Jan Wegmann
Set design: Suzy Riffel
Text narration: Svenja Peters

CUBICLE #3 in Lübeck

Composition: Orestis Papaioannou
Multimedia: Jan Wegmann
Set design: Orestis & Jan
Text narration: Svenja Peters

The post CUBICLE first appeared on Jan Wegmann.

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.

The post GRIT first appeared on Jan Wegmann.

Small ensemble, speech, live electronics, improvisation – everything is connected by a large LED video wall, light and surround sound. Traditional compositional practice is combined with modern multimedia technology, the familiar with the unfamiliar and the visual with sound. Sometimes the material comes together like a collage – perhaps incoherent at first sight – and sometimes the material is put into a new context through a different perspective. Tensions and flickering disturbances arise between the different layers, but they also merge into something completely new. Individual compositions combine to form a whole.

01.02.2020
Forum HfMT Hamburg

Meredith Nicoll – mezzo-soprano
Katharina Althen – oboe
Felix Stachelhaus – drums
Patrizia Scherer- performance
Yann Mbiene – performance
Juan Manuel Jaramillo – percussion
Lea Theus – direction

The post VERBINDUNG|VERFLECHTUNG|VERZERRUNG first appeared on Jan Wegmann.