-shikaku-

Most composers have composed their music based on the assumption that the audience will experience the works facing a stage with musicians. Most classical works aren’t made to be listened to from behind the stage. On the other hand, composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis have been working with the location of their audiences in mind, spatializing the music.

Young composer Chatori Shimizu (1990) wants to do this differently with -shikaku-, which is derived from the Japanese homophones “四角 (square)”, “視覚 (visual)”, and “死角 (blind spot)”, all pronounced “Shikaku”.

The setting of this work is designed so that the music is delivered to audience members surrounding the chamber orchestra, with deliberate blind spots.

 All audience members have a different “blind spot”, none of them will experience the work in the same way. This reflects the story of “Blind Men and An Elephant”, where a group of blind men touch an elephant, each feeling a different part of the animal, and discussing it. Argument breaks down when the men starts to claim that an elephant was a thin, floppy, fan-like creature, as another states that it was a smooth, solid being. Not one man’s statement is untrue, as those are the precise features of an elephant.

SOUND X SOUND

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard is a Danish composer who, in his series SOUND X SOUND has been working with multiplying instruments to make the sound transcend itself, creating a pure new sound without references to anything.

The SOUND X SOUND series consists of a cycle of 7” vinyls where each release is an exploration of one single instrument, multiplied. The first release consists of music composed for 8 recorders. The aim is to get the instrument to exceed its own familiar sound and be transformed into a new and clean sound, by multiplying it. It was released on the 25th of november on Hiatus.

Currently, Niels is running a crowdfunding campaign for his next 7”, a fantastic spectral piece based on 30 chromatic tuners. You can watch the Kickstarter video below.

In these two cases, Niels uses the strengths of the instruments very well, treating the recorder as a single frequency and the tuner as a spectral building block. This tickles my curiosity; what will be the next instrument in the SOUND X SOUND series?

Urban Resonances

The beautiful snowy Macedonian landscape

I am currently visiting Macedonia for the Urban Resonances project. With a group of artists and teachers from the Utrecht School of Music and Technology we travel from our home base Skopje through the country for concerts and master classes at schools and faculties of music. 

The project is an initiative of the Zoey foundation for arts and culture in the Netherlands and Public Room in Macedonia. You can read more about the project at their websites: ZOEY / Public Room. 

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A portrait of Eliane Radigue

In this portrait created by the Austrian Institute of Media Archeology we see Eliane Radigue, a remarkable French composer, talking about the process of composition and recording. As her cat sleeps on the cupboard, we see her tweaking the knobs of the old ARP 2500 synthesizer.

Eliane Radigue about her sounds: 

If you are ready to open yourself up to them, to listen truly and devote yourself to listening, they really have a fascinating, magnetic power. [...] Above all I listened to them with the greatest respect, trying to understand what they had to say.