Produced at IMA: Imagining Nature

In the series “Produced at IMA”, electro-acoustic works from the archives of the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics (IMA) are presented. As research lab for art that actively accompanies and promotes productions, the IMA disposes over an extremely diverse fund of works realized in the ZKM studios by international artists of electronic music. With this series, the long collaboration of the institute with artists will be made visible and, above all, audible to the public. The theme of the current edition bearing the title “imagining nature” is nature in electronic music. The most diverse compositional approaches are presented: from the integration of field noises in electro-acoustic compositions through to imagined landscapes as formal principle of a composition.
 

Program

Hildegard Westerkamp: “Für Dich/For You” (2005)
Thomas Gerwin: Excerpts from “Karlsruhe – Klangbilder einer Stadt” (1995)
Joachim Krebs: “Artificial Soundscape 3” (1997)
Hiromi Ishii: “Ginn - Tokio 2006” (2006)

The piece Für Dich/For You by Hildegard Westerkamp is a critical analysis of the poem “Liebes-Lied [Love Song]” by Rainer Maria Rilke. The composition extends the thematic field of the feelings between two people, and the power of love itself surrounding research on the meaning of homeland and love. Sound sources from two different places, together with the voice recordings of people who speak the poem in German and English, constitute the sound-musical language of the piece.

The Klangbilder einer Stadt [Sound Images of a City] form one of the sound-artistic investigations of the city of Karlsruhe and its environment, which is based on the “Klangwelt-Karte [Sound World Map]” by Thomas Gerwin: On a kind of “world sound piano” visitors of the ZKM | Media Museum are given the possibility to play a number of short soundscapes and O-sound-compositions. The recordings are arranged as derivatives of reality, but are sometimes significantly edited in order to distill the musical essence.

According to Karlsruhe composer Joachim Krebs, the “sound compositions of the cycle Artificial Soundscapes, beyond traditional categories and terms, seeks to establish in the ‘intermediate’ a sound art which attempts in a radical manner, and under the exclusive application of original sound materials, the three sound categories: nature, animal and human – to generate in continuous molecularisation and transformation the real sound, multi-linear, artificial sound structure.”

The fundamental idea of the piece Ginn – Tokio 2006 by Hiromi Ishii is marked by the visual impression of Tokyo as a gigantic, urban landscape: the strong contrast in the city between science-fiction modernity and traditional Shinto shrines, as well as traditional huts is what forms the fascination of this landscape. In the piece, Ishii asks the question as to how these configurations emerge next to one another.