»De la Nuit« was composed in 1999 for the Berlin festival Kryptonale and premiered in decommissioned, underground water tanks in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district. The basis for the sound conception and for the formal design of the piece is the acoustics of the tanks. In this case, the space under the ground was a kind of inspiration for the spirit of the piece.
The signal manipulation sources used in this piece seemingly have nothing to do with each other: a sample of a folkloristic Bulgarian instrumental piece, a short sample of a song by the band Massive Attack, and some metal sounds created with the physical modeling software »GENESIS« (ACROE, Grenoble).
While the sample of Massive Attack is hardly recognizable, the Bulgarian folklore was counterpointed with transpositions. The strangest moment of the piece occurs at its end, when the folklore sounds reversed along with some metallic gong tones. Not only were the sounds created in the physical model, but also the rhythm, phrasing and volume. This is done by a very slowly vibrating object, the mallet, which allows the musical shape to arise entirely from pendulum movements.
Using a compositional object as a source for a new work is a special situation. In the creation of a work composed out of samples, there are two very exciting factors that determine the spirit of the resulting piece. The first factor is working with the sample itself. Will it be completely destroyed or will it resist all attempts of modification? Is a new structure developed with the help of the sample or does it continue to be an isolated event?
A piano event, for example, can be modified by various methods: it can be stretched, shortened, inverted and modified in the spectral range and still remain an event; it can be used several times in different pitches, spatial positions, reverberation amounts, or one combines all these methods to create a complex structure that is different from the previous event.
The second factor arises when combining several structures, all of which have a different character. A new musical story or an entirely different timeline develops from these patches. In addition, both psychoacoustic and aesthetic aspects must be considered. One sound or structure can mask another if it is in a similar frequency range. Two sequences can merge if they have similar speed, pitch and sound substance. These problems must be solved signal processing techniques such as transposition, stretching, or looping.
The process of combining these different structures goes beyond a classic mix in which only modifications to amplitude and duration are made. There, many possibilities are tried out and discarded again. Sounds are further processed mostly in the form of transpositions and tested in the most diverse combinations. In the resulting composition, only 10% of the generated structures are finally used. The remaining 90% were necessary to make exactly the right combination of elements possible.
Rather than calling it a mix, I would consider this a combination of interpretation (responding to the content of the structures) and compositional idea (opposing the structure with something). In the finished composition, listeners can form an opinion whether the individual elements fit together to form a meaningful whole.
They may find that a musical narrative is developed through the piece, that the sounds are capable of creating tension and different levels of energy, that a crescendo is more than its increase in dynamics, or that the work is more than the sounds of which it is made out.
»De la Nuit« was created with the programs »Snd«, »Common Lisp Music« (William Schottstaedt, CCRMA, Stanford), »GENESIS« (ACROE, Grenoble) and »Common Music« (Heinrich Taube, Illinois) and performed on SGI computers at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.