Today and tomorrow: My commissioned piece “False Forks – Errant Waves in Arcadia” will be broadcast within the frame of Cashmere Radio’s collaboration with Maerzmusik festival Berlin 2022. There will be a listening session starting on Sunday, 10 pm, at Cashmere Radio.
For more info please look into https://cashmereradio.com/

False Forks (Errant waves in Arcadia)
32:35 min

Frequencies permeate our life world on all levels. They can be abstract, unfathomable, lurk at the threshold of our hearing, be extremely figurative or even plainly obtrusive. They can be soothing, piercing, alarming, beautiful, awe inspiring, familiar. Seldomly, they come along single, as one clear tone, more often they huddle in clusters or patterns. Frequencies sail like clouds along the horizons of our perception. They rain on us. And they sneak into the deepest layers of our brain, where they tickle memories or feelings or both.

For this piece, I was looking for frequencies offside the tech sphere (if such a thing is possible). There is, of course, the language of animals and the mumblings of human voices, the resounding of instruments, elemental drones, doorbells, sewing machines. I became especially interested in those clusters of wavelengths one finds grouped in little scenes of everyday life. While having fun with my work I kept thinking about ‘forking paths’ and forks and branches, about ‘taking a wrong turn’, and about mazes and ‘amazement’. It seems though, that frequencies are much too ephemeral to follow any track, be it right or wrong. Under their cloaks of math or (astro)physical formulas I imagine they foster secret urges to roll about in the mud and dirt, to permeate and mingle, to travel as sirens across the seas of the city, or to be breathed out of the pleats of an accordion.

As a series of life-world-frequency vignettes, “False Forks (Errant Waves in Arcardia)” assembles varied notions of mimicry, dirt, duration and osmosis.

Recordings and composition /Aufnahmen und Komposition
Gabi Schaffner 2022

Credits
Accordion/Akkordeon: Olsen auf Aldebaran, 2020
Musical Saw/SIngende Säge: Mimosa Pale, 2012/2020
Cat/Kater: Augustin, 2021
Drums: Toni Brokoli, Patrick Guderitz, 2020
String instrument/Saiteninstrument: Anonymous lady in Folk Music Shop, Taiwan 2019
Xylophone/ Xylophon: Stella Braun, 2011
Recording Husky dogs / Aufnahme von Huskys: Nathalie Grenzhaeuser, 2021