Tag Archives: handmade generative music

handmade generative music

News, Sound Art Radio

48-hour Radio Art Festival: On Air On Site. 3 pm, April 15

Radio Art Festival “On Air On Site” starts tomorrow, April 14!
Live Radio at Institute of Sonology.
Curated by Margherita Brillada and Leonie Roessler

On Air -On Site #1 is a sound investigation of a temporary radio event consisting of a broadcast schedule of 48 hours of non-stop streaming, including live performances/shows, fixed media, and prerecorded work specifically composed for the festival.By re-thinking radio as an exhibition space for experimental sound art andexperimental electronic music, the event aims to explore the possibilities of a broader project with the ultimate goal of developing a community experimental radio station in Den Haag, seeking collaborators and looking for a common interest in radio practice. The event will explore the boundaries of being simultaneously on air in a physical and virtual space, challenging different radio formats.

http://www.westdenhaag.nl/information/exhibitions/23_03_On_Air_On_Site/press/23_03_On_Air_On_Site_EN.pdf

Loop #3 has evolved from my recent experiments in micro-looping and its influence on time perception dating back to 2020. “Time Is A Sliding Door” (Radiophrenia 2020) could be considered a forerunner, and clearly speaks with the voices of many clocks and cuckoos entangled in frequencies and field recording, yet…
Later in 2021, sifting through tons of field recordings for the 22-hour {A Wave Novel} for radioart.zone, I dreamt of giant ‘musical waves’ generated for this mission by some really smart and lucid machine/program/spaceship. It did not happen; instead, I assembled everything by hand.

Finally, at the IMPROVISORIUM Seanaps Radio Lab in 2022 I took up that thoroughly composted idea of using micro snippets of ‘audio trash’, long-lived-with sonic crumbs, and further semi-redundant sound material of short duration as a pattern-weaving material. And lo behold: It worked out. At least I think so.

Sound Art Radio, works

Music4Trains

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.