Diemo Schwarz
Fine Sound Art since 1993Live concert at the Linux Sound Night, ZKM, Karlsruhe
Live concert at the Linux Sound Night on the 2nd International Linux Audio Conference in the ZKM, Karlsruhe
Electro-Mechanical Ambience is a live set of 30-45 minutes. It was performed two times before, first in 2001 at the Buro Placard #4 72h non-stop headphone festival, streamed between Paris and Vienna, and second in 2003 at the Reseaunances streaming concerts, an alternative (viral) event to Ircam’s host festival Resonances in Paris.
The piece started out, for its first performance, as a duo set for guitar, electro-mechanical sound sources, and heavy analog processing, without any computer or DSP. For the second performance, the guitar player and most of the processing had been replaced by jMax patches, except for an old Roland analog vocoder which sounds very unique but isi heavy to carry. Now, all non-mechanical sound sources and processing run on a Linux laptop with jMax as the main environment, interfacing via JACK with various LADSPA plugins (vocoder, delay, distortion).
Prerecorded sounds from field recordings and radio static form the basis for mechanically produced noises juxtaposed to electronic sounds and processing. The centrepiece of the mechanical side is a 1970′s Stylophone, a beginner’s instrument with nothing but one (discretely built) oscillator, a loudspeaker, and a metallic contact-keyboard played with a stylus. However, this instrument is completely perverted, since the (rather obnoxious sounding) oscillator isn’t even used. Only the loudspeaker is used, but inversely, i.e. as a microphone. This transforms the whole gridded surface of the box into a canvas for producing rubbing, scratching, tapping and other noises with various tools, one of which is a little upwindable toy robot that is made to walk on the stylophone. Through a vocoder, this input modulates the sound base of drony field recordings.
Comments are closed
You must be logged in to post a comment.