Zeichnung (2005)

4-channel piece.

«Zeichnung» is German for drawing / subscription / delineation, and is meant as the general act of wounding a (formerly homogeneous) surface. The title was chosen to direct one’s thought to the graphical terms of contour / lines / gestalt, the idea of over-subscription or tracing. In the process of recursive tracing (as you know from copy-art using “bad“ Xerox devices for example), two distinct things happen : Characteristic traits of the “original“ get emphasized or even over-emphasized, on the other hand “mistakes“, “dust“, subjectivity etc. intrudes the process and become an integral part of the results.

I wanted to create a piece just of noises because I increasingly feel an alienation towards pitched sounds and noises having a calming effect on the psyche. At the same time, I wanted to try to not let too much of my subjective gestures and expression come into the piece too early, so I decided to “select“ an original phrase out of a non-musical performance and have the whole micro- and macro-time structure be determined by stupidly imitating this found phrase (where the delineation, similarly, is indifferent towards the canvas). Four different sound fields exist in the piece, both in succession and simultaneously, glass, stones, plastic film and foam. These have been recorded simultaneously from four different acoustical perspectives such as to create a spatial cubistic situation a priori.

A random order of succession of the materials was chosen and the imitations carried out as “precise“ as possible, where the process of creating these imitation was for me, personally, the most important part of the work. It was about challenging yourself permanently with questions about similarity, the way we hear, and the absurd situation of having a stone following the articulation of foam, etc.

I tried to reduce sound processing to a minimum, retaining the assiduous work of several hundreds of tiny cuts as the central element, where in the second part the animistic, resonant processes will take over at first and then interplay with the dry material.

The listener is asked to not try to seek musical form, but to carefully follow the colour of the noises, the spatial interplay of different material playing the same mechanic-organic patterns, forming new hybrid materials.

Zeichnung (stereo downmix; use headphones)