ARD Radio Play Days

A dialog between two entities. One voiceless, forced to speak through the other. The other mere material, meaningless without the violent force of its counterpart. The stage, an architecture with arbitrary geometric axioms. Narrated from without by a choir of sawtooth wave generators.

The conceptual point of departure for this work is the contextualisation of musical notation within architectural structuralism as manifested by Herman Hertzberger. Notation in this context is seen as the interplay between form and material. Form (or thought) as acting upon a material object, inscribing itself onto it, speaking through it. Material as conditioning the possible expression of form by way of its own physical limits.

The material point of departure on the other hand is the process of probing the spatial and sonic characteristics of a space by LIDAR and impulse response respectively. Point clouds as a spatial analogy to single sample impulses and frequency ramps throughout the audible range act as a metaphor for the mapping of architectural and notational space.

»Trails« develops soundscapes from what you hear as you walk through Nordmarka, the northern part of the forest around Oslo, towards Lake Maridalsvannet - the largest lake in the municipality. The piece takes the form of a narrative made up of the processed sounds of birds, streams and waterfalls, cracking and breaking branches, footsteps, falling stones or the echo of boat signals from afar. There are a variety of trails to explore. The deeper you go into the forest and into your mind, the more the soundscapes transform into other densely constructed sound worlds until you reach Maridalsvannet. There you see the calm, peaceful lake standing still, reflecting grey, heavy clouds floating in the sky. As the fog moves on and covers the surface of the lake, you step on the trail leading home in the growing darkness…

• Frequenz Karte / Frequency map 02:15
• Gegenverkehrskarte / Oncoming traffic map 02:00
• Kurvenkarte / Curve map 03:00
• Flugbuchungskarte / Flight booking map 03:33
• Brücken und Tunnel Karte / Bridge and tunnel map 03:20

This audiovisual installation is based on several cartographic documents in which Julia Jasmin Rommel has visualized different aspects of the interspace – the mental state we are in during the routine crossing of distances between places A and B. They address, among other things, transitions, restlessness and continuity, sense of orientation and change of direction, and are each documented by experimental but context-related criteria and methods. Space structuring elements such as tunnel and bridge crossings, counter-trains, flight booking data, curve angles of certain railway lines form the parameters of these movement protocols. Using the graphic sequencer »IanniX« these protocols are translated into sound. In a sort of sonification the attempt is made to do justice both to the linearity of documented paths and to the map as a medium of overview. Rommel's interest lies in the interface between reading signs and interpreting images, which is made possible by the transformation into sound.

The acousmatic, 42-channel composition »Falling« was created for its world premiere at the Centro de Cultural de Belem in Lisbon. On the occasion of the Beethoven Year 2020, Falling deals with a very late composition of the master: »Die Große Fuge« (op. 133). This string quartet provided the tonal material for all the sounds in the piece. For »Falling«, the material was turned completely upside down, pressed into new energetic shapes, and thus pursues an independent dramaturgical course. Nevertheless, individual phrases or chords of Beethoven shine through again and again. For this, one does not have to know the underlying composition and can also get involved in this expansive work without this background, which has some surprising twists. If the material is charged with energy more and more at the beginning, if time is compressed more and more, this collapses after a while and turns to the timeless, the expansion of the moment. Some chords of Beethoven are expanded into infinity, similar to the expansion of time near places of extreme density, as is the case with black holes. What remains is the experience of a short moment in an extreme duration.

A commissioned work of the Arte No Tempo Lisbon