Narrated landscapes in Iceland and Australia Commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur 2016. Composition and text. Phonurgia Nova Fieldrecording Award 2016: Honorable Mention.
Hidden Places is a cluster of 18 compositions centered on the idea of “wilderness” descriptions from Iceland and Australia.
The concept of landscape is manmade, and it is predominantly Western culture that defines our notion of nature. As a free form poetic quest Hidden Places examines the ways how this is done and it does so by asking people for their stories.
Der Tapir im Birkenwald. DLF Kultur. Production: Tina Klopp. “Selfmade Life”, that’s how the Finnish term “ITE” – Itse Tehti Elämä – translates. Erkki Pirtola who died in January 2016, was obsessed with his life-long project to document on the self-taught artists populating the remote corners of Finland. He produced thousands of video tapes. I was told that a person working daily on Pirtola’s archive would need up to 4 years just to catalogue the material.
Erkki died at the age of 65 – and very suddenly. This feature is my homage to this extraordinary artist and friend. Music: FX Schroeder et al.
Based on an interview with the Finnish artist Teuri Haarla about the beneficial qualities of earthworms. Microtonality and theatrical elements are combined into a 20min audio-lsd-trip. Originally created for radia.fm. Show #592. Hosted by radio x Frankfurt, Verena Kuni. The „Earthworm“ was featured within the frame of the Radiophrenia Festival, Glasgow 2016 and at Documenta14 Public Radio, 2017, curated by Knut Aufermann and Sarah Washington. Length: 27 min.
The earthworm travels on radio frequencies, earthy hacks and
conglomerates of audio matter. S/he passes through mosquito clouds (yes,
this earthworm can fly!), bird songs, thunderstorms, attends a Finnish
summer theatre show, listens to a boy and his mother singing, visits the
acoustic remnants of a German garden show, finds happiness in the
ringing of porcelain bells and, finally, merges into silence and is
gone.
Voices:
Teuri Haarla, interview at Galerie Hilbertraum, 16th January 2016,
Berlin, Germany; Unknown but stunningly convincing actors of a
“kesäteatteri” 2010 in Mid Finland;
Gibrain and Virpi Nurmi, Gießen, Germany, 2014.
Supplemented by a series of cartoons. Documenta14 broadcast. Listen on Mixcloud:
Everyone knows trains. They take you from A to B. And possibly back.
The train is a myth, not only as a means of transportation, but also as a reinvention of the concepts of time and speed. A train can also be considered as a narrative – with an open end and an open beginning. In between: a time-stream filled with acoustic imagery.
Kunstfrühling Bremen 2014. Galerie Herold. Gabi Schaffner: Music4Trains – Installation and performance with Ansgar Wilken; Installation and intervention: The Fado Hour Kuratiert von: Marion Bösen Installation: 4 CD players, 64 Speakers in 4 clusters Performance: with Ansgar Wilken (Cello) Vinyl-Edition: 10 copies. Dubplate & handprinted cover. Price 120 Euro (1 left)
10 individually printed silkscreen record covers
Ansgar Wilken. Photos: Jens Weyers
On my way to performing
Unpacking a suitcase
In Music4Trains, the acoustic qualities of environmental, accidental sounds are used as musical elements. In turn, selected samples from the canon of modern composition got freed from their original structure and shred down to fragments of noise. I did so to show my appreciation for work already done in the field of “locomotive music”. At the same time, this rather casual choice reflects the thorough omission of another thousand of musical works done on trains.
The ‘classic’ fragments were spliced, looped, speeded up or down, hacked into, turned over or reversed, until they turned into an acoustic debris not unlike the stuff you find in the trackbeds between the blackish grid and those patches of sturdy, uncompromising vegetation.
Conversations, phone calls on platforms, loudspeaker announcements, children’s screams, the sticky scent of human presence. A violin played at Hauptwache Frankfurt, an opera singer practising in an underpass somewhere in New Zealand, Hamburg’s main station anti-junky classic muzak, freight trains passing through Bremen and Gießen stations, Polish workers taking their leave from Berlin. I have been travelling u-tube videos, sampling away on Hungarian passenger trains and on the archives of freesound.org. And I taped this sad and furious old lady on a train to Vienna.
I am in love with breaches, flaws, mistakes, gaps and of course: noise. All of this connect us to the intangible fleeting beauty of our daily lives that are made up of noises, sounds and an all-pervading music. More unused field recordings of trains and stations rumble about on my hard drives, shifting there like restless sleepers in their digital trackbeds. These four pieces are what came into being for now. Anything more you’ll have to make up yourself.
Otto Mötö. Into the Universe of Finnish Motor Music. From the Archives of Martti Mauri (1935-2003)
“Otto Mötö” deals with the archives of the fictitious engine researcher and avant-garde composer Martti Mauri (1935-2007), whose tracks were traded among insiders as forerunners of techno and “new media” music. “Otto Möto” is based solely on field recordings / samples of engine noise. The album experiments in composition, textual and pictorial material with the invention of a personality, his artistic work and embedding in the musical history of his country. The original recordings were made during my travels in Finland. Nine artists participated in the creation of Mauri’s compositions. The project received the support of the Finnish Kone Foundation, Finland, in 2011.
The radio play “Otto Möto” received the prize “Radio Play of the Month” of the German Academy of Performing Arts in 2012 and was broadcast internationally.
500 copies, 2005. Gruenrekorder, Frankfurt. The album was created during a project grant of Feuerwache Mannheim, curated by Lothar Krauss. The album’s first presentation was for the Mannheim exhibition “Gabi Schaffner: Audiographien und Déja-vues”, also in 2005.
Concept, texts, design, field recordings: Gabi Schaffner Tracks mixed/composed/rendered by: Ben Galo, Felix Schroeder, Frau Kraushaar, Gabi Schaffner, Jens Röhm, Martin Moritz, Roland Etzin, Lasse-Marc Riek
I bet you didn’t know that there is a Finish tradition called „Snow Walking“, intended to calm the mind. It harks all the way back to the national epos, the Kalevala, which speaks explicitely of “scooping rhe songs out of the frost” and of “unlocking the box of tales”. But don’t worry – not many other people have heard of it, either. The very informative text, which accompanies this release, which can either be bought as a regular CD* or a luxuriously packaged, truly beautiful LP (have I made amply clear, which one I prefer?), therefore serves to outline the aims of the project: To present the entire spectrum of snow music, from its folk roots to its present forms, to capture the “poetic universe of snow” and to “mark its entry into the 21st Century”.
Review Tobias Fischer, 2005 (continued below) * only vinyl was released, no CDs
Based on the field recordings made by the famous Sisukas Poronainen from the renowned “Kansanmusiikin Instituutti “(which, I am sure, I need not explain any further), Gabi Schaffner (who has already held publich lectures on the subject) has taken on the task of sifting through the material, selecting the most representative cuts and of researching the scene for assorted genres, such as “Lumi Core” (Snow Core) and acts from the experimental scene, who are carrying on the traditions. She has found some wonderful music and a fair amount of equally fascinating stories. Take the tale of the “Tytönhamepilvet” for example, tiny clouds, which come into existence closely to the ground, which is why they are referred to as “Maiden’s Skirt Clouds”. Local boys will anxiously await the day of their arrival and then run around the field, trying to stick their heads into them. The eponymosuly titled piece on the record captures the ambiance in one of these clouds, a tinkling and chiming mid-winter dream. While this track was later edited in the studio, other titles were left in their original state, such as the “Circular Snow Walk, a hypnotic melange of repetetive balalaika-patterns and the foot steps of the walkers circling a tree. The “Sleigh Ride” features a plucked motive on the ancient Finnish Kantelele, an instrument with five to fifteen strings and a carved wooden body. While the first side of the album concentrates on similar, unprocessed material, the second site investigates the current exponents of the scene, including the bizarre noise experiments of the Snow-Core bands (who ardously collect samples from snow excursions, in order to fulfill the 50% snow-quota in their music) and the dark, eleven-minute long dronescape “Joen Ylitys”, which builds from a richly harmonic opening, seemingly filled with the sound of an orchestra tuning, into a dark and threatening barrier of deep bass pads.
All of this may seem like a foreign and unexplored world to you. And it seems, as though some are doing all they can to leave things this way. When we tried to find information about the contributinmg Finnish artists, we couldn’t find any and when we called the Kansanmusiikin Instituutti, they claimed to never have heard of Sisukas Poronainen. We assume this is an intended effort to stop thinking too much about the historical background and to just enjoy the music. It should be noted, however, that Gabi Schaffner’s public speech was entitled “Snow Music – Fake or truth?”. And that the “Acknowledgments”-section mentions a lot of acts which have no relation whatever to Finland, but a very close one with the German Gruenrekorder label. In any case, they have remained almost entirely true to the Kalevas creed: The songs may not have been scooped exclusively from the frost, but the box of tales has certainly been unlocked.
