rdd – robodynamic diffusion

The RDD system utilizes a custom built uni-directional speaker that produces a tightly focused beam of sound, like a sonic spotlight, which can be robotically aimed in any direction from any single position within the performance space. This robotic speaker is in effect a mobile soloist, however the resulting experience upends expectations: cast into the room, the RDD’s sonic beam bounces and blends with the reverberant space in subtle and surprising ways. Much of the time the sound appears to originate from invisible yet mobile sources in the room or from the walls, floor and ceiling themselves. We look around for another sound source, only to realize that the room’s own reflections are transforming this robot soloist into a spectral ensemble. Though we can rationally connect the sound’s source to the position of the robot, its ventriloquistic projections open the potential for sounding to the entire volume of the room. No longer a simple container, the room becomes a respondent and the sonic coauthor of a spatial drama. Likewise, as the speaker’s narrow beam reflects it produces complex patterns of sound that vary widely by listening position, such that a listener’s own movements produce striking changes in what they hear. The audience for an RDD performance is invited to move and explore these acoustic effects, to displace themselves from their passive position as audience-receivers and into a system of feedback and response as listener-collaborators.

RDD’s robot is not intended to be the work’s focus, but is important primarily for the displacements it can effect: controlled disorientations and sensory redirections which invite a refreshed engagement with the choreographed situation, toward a sense of space that is multi-perspectival and responsive. These displacements begin with the speakers themselves. Spatialized audio, whether multichannel surround or wave field synthesis, is delivered traditionally from a set of fixed loudspeakers. Movement is simulated by the transition of sound between these fixed elements. This defines what RDD co-founder Jan St. Werner calls a ‘room within a room’, a kind of virtual space of listening placed within the real space we occupy as persons.

Andy Graydon

Robodynamische Diffusion (RDD) ist ein Projekt von Michael Akstaller, Nele Jäger, Oliver Mayer und Jan St. Werner

Gefördert von LEONARDO – Zentrum für Kreativität und Innovation TH Nürnberg und Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung von Evocortex

Fotos & Video Joseph Kadow / Single RDD Foto Eunice Maurice / Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

encourage the stream – kunsthalle baden-baden

Encourage The Stream (2021) by Jan St. Werner, half of the electronic music group Mouse on Mars, functions as an acoustic amplification of the Oos River, which flows through the park as the heart of Baden-Baden and shapes its nature. In an attempt to communicate with the Oos, Werner places a microphone just above the water to transport the sound of the river via a directional loudspeaker beyond the riverbank into the park toward the Kunsthalle. Thereby, Werner creates the possibility to explore and perceive the Oos at different frequencies of sound (acoustically) and create new spatial relationships. The active act of listening creates a perceptual experience of distance and proximity. The acoustic supersedence of space and time also stands for engagement with the forces of nature. It is therefore no coincidence that the first large-scale public art work commissioned by Çağla İlk and Misal Adnan Yıldız for their tenure as directors of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden is a single project of an experimental artistic practice that brings together the fields of visual art and sound.

Imperium Droop – Thrill Jockey

Thrill-549 – 2021

The duo of John Colpitts aka Kid Millions and Jan St. Werner brings together the minds of two mavericks committed to exploring new avenues of musical expression. Kid Millions is one of the most sought after drummers and improvisors in NYC, known for his expansive solo work as Man Forever, as well as collaborations and performances with the likes of Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Boredoms, and So Percussion. Millions’ acclaim is equally rooted in his work with rock bands such as his own Oneida, as well as working with bands like Royal Trux and Spiritualized. Jan St. Werner has consistently remained at the vanguard of electronic music with his work as one half of Mouse on Mars as well as with his solo work and collaborations with The Fall’s Mark E Smith, Oval’s Markus Popp, Stereolab and The National. On their debut collaboration Imperium Droop, Millions and Werner, along with special guests Mats Gustafsson, Andrew Barker, and Richard Hoffman, created a collection of beautiful pieces built on surprising sound combinations. Together, the works on Imperium Droop are a joyful listen and an exhilarating foray into the unknown.

Imperium Droop is the continuation of an ongoing musical dialogue between the two musicians that began in 2016, when Werner invited Millions to perform an interpretation of his Felder album as part of a series of curated concerts and interventions around the globe. Oddly prescient of the events of 2020, the unique performance was held at Oneida’s practice space with an extremely limited audience of one – songwriter Helado Negro. The concert was to be the first in an ongoing series of  recorded collaborations between the two musicians, from improvised live performances in New York and Berlin. In addition to a series of concerts accessible via the internet, the duo slowly archived a wealth of recorded material that would form the foundations for Imperium Droop. Revisiting and reimagining this material, the duo meticulously edited and arranged elements of the recordings, from full sections to individual sounds, sculpting new pieces from the library of improvisations. Another equally important component for the album was  Mouse on Mars’ collaboration with Lee Scratch Perry which had a profound effect on Werner’s artistic practice and approach in the studio.

Werner’s application of a seemingly infinite arsenal of textures unleashes colorful swaths of energy. Mats Gustafsson joins Werner on the maximalist “Color Bagpipes,” unleashing torrents of swiveling melody and breathy clicks over the exponential thunder of Millions’ drum kit. Pieces like “Dark Tetrad” and “Astral Stare” demonstrate the duo’s mastery of space and surprise. Dark flutters flow in slow pulses across “Apotropaic” where erratic swirls of sound twist and mutate on “Sorrows and Compensations,” unified as a single force by the overwhelming diversity of sounds. Millions’ drums effortlessly ride each wave of Werner’s prismatic deluges and channel their energy into dynamic movements. Through his singular prowess, Millions’ tireless rhythms and subtle gestures mirror Werner’s boundless textural palette and drive each piece towards transcendence. 

On Imperium Droop, Kid Millions and Jan St. Werner have combined their powers into an incomparable work of gripping and intrepid sonic fluctuations. In exploring a liminal space between improvisation and composition, the duo manage to expand their musical dialogue beyond the physical limitations of space and time, striking a truly unique balance between the urgency and unpredictability of improvised performance and deliberate nature of studio composition.

https://mouseonmarstj.bandcamp.com/album/imperium-droop

Alchemical – bitforms gallery

bitforms gallery is pleased to introduce ​Alchemical​, a collaborative exhibition by Casey Reas and Jan St. Werner. ​Alchemical presents the artists’ suite of videos alongside a selection of prints by Casey Reas. The online component of this exhibition is presented in collaboration with New Art City.

Untitled Film Stills are a series of prints that trace Reas’ exploration of generative adversarial networks (GAN) as image-making instruments. This empirical procedure more closely resembles alchemy than the artist’s usual practice of software art. Reas and technical lead Hye Min Cho trained GANs with specific films selected for their visual and emotional environments. The artist extracted impressions from consequent material, thereby positioning GANs as an apparatus of his visual language. ​Untitled Film Stills​ are selections from the unique and labored procedure of modeling, generating, and editing.

As the ​Untitled Film Stills​ evolved over a year of production, Reas began animating images that formed the video series ​Untitled ​ 1–5. This cyclical procedure required GAN models to be repeatedly trained to produce a range of images the artist could choreograph with cinematic transitions. Works within this series signal toward subject matter through titles such as ​Untitled 4
(Two Dead!)
​ or ​Untitled 1 (No. Nothing.)​ . Reas’ directed movement is instilled with uncanny gestures made manifest through the sentient electroacoustic sounds of Jan St. Werner.

Werner’s compositions augment the transmutation of imagery in and out of recognition by adapting computer-generated sounds with granular synthesis, a technique that transforms acoustic events into microscopic grains to be arranged and modulated freely. This process allows certain auditory signals to be obscured while others may manifest suddenly. The final culmination of visuals and sound mimics a discernible lexicon of film while establishing a new, multi-sensory expression of cinema.

Alchemical​ delights in the curious combination of machine and human perception. The works synthesize image comprehension through an incantation of sound and motion. Werner and Reas employ a critical process of mediation in relation to machine learning that honors the processes of transformation and combination over generative output.

Thank you to Meyer Sound and Sound Associates for their generous contributions that make it possible to provide a spatial audio experience of Jan St. Werner’s compositions in the exhibition space.

Alchemical
by Casey Reas + Jan St. Werner
January 8–February 14, 2021
Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 AM–6 PM

Virtual exhibition tour

https://www.art-agenda.com/features/377888/casey-reas-and-jan-st-werner-s-alchemical

compressed cinema – reas & werner

Compressed Cinema is the series title for five new audiovisual works completing in 2020. The video images were created by Casey REAS, and each work has a stereo audio track composed by Jan St. Werner.

The images for the videos were derived from a set of “film stills” created by Casey REAS with generative adversarial networks (GANs). This process is documented in REAS’ 2020 book Making Pictures with Generative Adversarial Networks.

http://ww.compressedcinema.net


//

Casey REAS’ software, prints, and installations have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work ranges from small works on paper to urban-scale installations, and he balances solo work in the studio with collaborations. Reas’ work is in a range of private and public collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Reas is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. With Ben Fry, Reas initiated Processing in 2001; Processing is an open-source programming language and environment for the visual arts.

More at https://reas.com

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Jan St. Werner is an electronic music composer and artist based in Berlin. He’s best known as one half of the electronic duo Mouse on Mars, and he also pursued a solo career creating music under his own name as well as Lithops, Noisemashinetapes, and Neuter River. Starting in the mid-1990’s as part of Cologne’s A-Musik collective, St. Werner released a steady stream of influential records both as a solo artist and with Mouse on Mars. During the 2000s, he acted as the artistic director for Amsterdam’s Institute for Electronic Music (STEIM). In 2013 Werner launched a series of experimental recordings called the Fiepblatter Catalogue on Thrill Jockey Records. Werner has been a visiting lecturer at the Arts Culture and Technology department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, and he holds a position as a professor for Interactive Media and Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, Germany.

More at https://fiepblatter.com/

//

Molocular Meditation – Editions Mego

Molocular Meditation, LP, 2020

Molocular Meditation is a bespoke light and sound environment featuring the voice of the Fall’s Mark E Smith. Smith is heard making observations on mundane objects, events and a range of meditation techniques basically associating his discontent with an apolitical british upper class. His voice forms the narrative component of an electroacoustic composition by Jan St. Werner placed in a hyper-real scenario evoking a state of transformation and deceleration. Molecular Meditation premiered at Cornerhouse, Manchester in 2014. This album presents a re-edited stereo version of the original multi-channel installation. Voice and guitar feedbacks were recorded by Werner and Smith at Blueprint Studios Manchester, electronics in Werner’s Studio in Berlin.

The B-side consists of unreleased new work partly written around the same time as Molocular Meditation in context of Werner’s Fiepblatter Catalogue on Thrill Jockey. Back to Animals is a non-metric rhythm exercise frantically hybridizing percussive accents with synthesized pulse. On the Infinite of Universe and Worlds is the layout for an electronic opera on Giordano Bruno’s Renaissance writings which Werner was asked to conceptionalize for Finish festival Musica Nova. VS Canceled finds Mark E. Smith reading an email from Domino Records explaining their discontinuation of Von Sudenfed, a band Mark E. Smith had founded with Mouse on Mars’ Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma in 2006. Their debut album Tromatic Reflexxions came out on Domino in 2007.

http://editionsmego.com/release/EMEGO265

https://fiepblatter.bandcamp.com/album/molocular-meditation

The Spatio Sensory Soundcheck – HKW

Sound becomes a spatial experience, band structures are deconstructed, a brand new sound technology celebrates its premiere in art: In 2018, Jan St. Werner, part of the duo Mouse on Mars, listened to a festival sound check by the US indie rock band The National. Echoes, voices and acoustic artifacts overlapped, songs were begun and interrupted, harmonies were detuned and filtered. The image of the perfect rock band was torn open, while at the same time the incompleteness of the action seemed to follow a method. The ambient sound installation The Spatio Sensory Soundcheck reconstructs this experience. The musician and composer disassembled a sound check recording as well as individual tracks of the current album I Am Easy to Find by The National, then electronically manipulated and reassembled them with his own elements. Mouse on Mars and The National had contributed music to each other’s most recent albums. Now Werner goes a step further – the installation dissolves the categories of band and album and shifts tsounds in a continuous state of instability on a psychoacoustic stage: With a novel speaker system based on wave field synthesis, Jan St. Werner arranges the sounds independently of each other in the space; movements and perspectives of the listeners become part of the composition.

https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_163508.php

The installation employs a speaker system by Holoplot. The audio technology of the Berlin-based company creates fully digital 3D-beamforming of multiple audio beams based on its own wave field synthesis algorithms and real-time audio processing.

Glottal Wolpertinger – fiepblatter catalogue #6


Glottal Wolpertinger was initially conceived as a radio installation for documenta 14, with each of the tracks broadcasting individually over the course of ten weeks and culminating in a convergence of all eight tracks at a performance in Athens. The pieces consist of microtonally tuned feedback, multispectral drones which Werner modulated and filtered with a purposeful, and indeed vocalized, emphasis given to the different frequencies and textures used. By naming the individual frequency bands, Werner defies traditional tuning systems and instead centers the piece on collaging variable elements. Sonic elements churn and sprawl across the tracks in constant motion. Their drones, combatting for space, entangle one another and oscillate into overtones that shift, build, and wither with fluid motion that blurs the line between consonance and dissonance.

Glottal Wolpertinger’s incarnation as a recording is no less potent than its preceding forms, but serves as a continuation of the project’s evolution as a distinct listening experience. Werner’s apt title for the project embellishes the ambiguity and cognitive dissonance inherent with the work, as the wolpertinger is a creature of European myth which is said to be the mutated result of different species breeding under special circumstances in the Alps. Glottal intonations are those produced by the guttural and throat region of the body, the center of organic sound. According to Werner, wolpertingers are “bastards, collaged freaks who exist in the grey zone of nature’s perfect plan,” the same grey zone in which his pieces live.

http://thrilljockey.com/products/glottal-wolpertinger-fiepblatter-catalogue-6

http://thrilljockey.com/artists/jan-st-werner

https://fiepblatter.bandcamp.com/album/glottal-wolpertinger-feedback-modulation

Written, performed and produced by Jan St. Werner

Live guitar Aaron Dessner

Studio guitar Bryce Dessner

Software Dietrich Pank

Voice Jessica Rasmussen

Additional Live recordings by David Memari and Paolo Thorsten-Nagel

Mastered by Rashad Becker

Artwork by Paul McDevitt & Cornelius Quabeck

Art Direction by Rupert Smyth Studio

Fiepblatter Catalogue # 6

Thrill Jockey 488

central spark in the dark – WDR

Für Schlagzeug und Elektronik – Kompositionsauftrag des WDR – UA 
Dirk Rothbrust – Schlagzeug
Jan St. Werner – Elektronik & Komposition

Samstag, 23.02.2019 WDR Funkhaus Köln & WDR3 Radio

https://www1.wdr.de/radio/wdr3/veranstaltungen/musik-der-zeit-346.html

»central spark in the dark« erkundet und dynamisiert die Beziehungen zwischen Elektronik und Akustik, zwischen Klang aus den Lautsprechern und Perkussionsinstrumenten, zwischen den Reflexionen im Raum und dem Klangbild im Kopf des Zuhörers. Die mehrkanalige Mischung erlaubt den komposito- rischen Elementen eine erweiterte Räumlichkeit: Klänge treffen sich nicht ausschließlich in den Schaltkreisen des Mischpults, sondern mitten im Aufführungsraum – in the air.

»central spark« lässt sich auch als Paradox verstehen, denn in dem Stück gibt es keine Mitte, keine zentrale Perspektive. Jeder Funke könnte selbst Zentrum eines klanglichen Universums sein. Die akustischen Signale werden kontinuierlich und oft abrupt verschoben, sie lösen kognitive »Zündungen« beim Hörer aus. »spark« steht auch für eine akzentuierte Kontrapunktion, für einen Rhythmus, der aus ständigen dialogischen Bewegungen neue Klangbeziehungen generiert und sie über die Grenzen der Notationslinien schiebt. Es gibt keine tonalen Flächen, aus denen harmonische Verdichtungen entstehen, sondern schnelle, partielle Verknüpfungen, durch die sich unvermittelt neue Räume öffnen und in denen sich in Mikrozeit musikalische Figuren bilden – wie Wunderkerzen, die kurz im Dunkel unserer Vorstellungswelt gezündet werden und ebenso schnell wieder verlöschen. Die digitalen »sparks« sind wie Steine, die über gefrorene Eisdecken springen. Es prasseln disparate Materialien in verschiedenen Aggregatzuständen aufeinander; Feuer, Eis, scharfe Splitter, wie aus felsenfesten Formen gesprengt. Es entsteht ein dynamisierter Raum, in dem extreme Kräfte wirken.

Das Arsenal des Schlagzeugers ist nach dem Klangbild der Elektronik ausgerichtet und kontrastiert es. So greift der Instrumentalist die Bewegungen der stark manipulierten, computergenerierten Klänge auf und steht mit seinen klanglich klar umrissenen Formen dem unendlich variierbaren des Digitalen gegenüber.

Video: Nik Kern

Fotos: Felix Berner


Periodic Composite Waveform Environment – Ultima Festival

Ensemble neoN & Jan St. Werner
feat. Dynamische Akustische Forschung – Periodic Composite Waveform Environment (WP)
Henie Onstad Kunstsenter
15 & 16 September 2018

https://ultima.no/en/events/ensemble-neon-and-jan-st-werner-wp

Experimental electronic composer Jan St. Werner (Mouse On Mars, Lithops, Microstoria) and Ensemble neoN collaborate on an unconventional performance format that includes new compositions, improvisation, spatial arrangements and interventions from Werner’s class in Dynamic Acoustic Research, which he leads at Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts. For two days, Ensemble neoN will take up residence at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and a space will open up in which a mass of different audio practices will be exercised. Dynamic Acoustic Research is a radical course of investigation into post-war contemporary music, psychoacoustics and unconventional methods of capturing and producing sound and music. Periodic Composite Waveform Environment explores sound as an unstable art form and pushes players to the limits of their capacities.

11.00   Periodic Composite Waveform Environment Pt 1
Ensemble Neon & Jan St. Werner  
12.00   Intervention 1
Dynamische Akustische Forschung
12.30   Jan St. Werner performs Solo Pieces from the Fiepblatter Catalogue
13.00   Innermost Effects 1 – Texts by Thomas Raab and others Ensemble Neon & Jan St. Werner
14.00   Periodic Composite Waveform Environment Pt 2
Ensemble Neon & Jan St. Werner 
14.30   Intervention 2 Dynamische Akustische Forschung
15.30   Jan St. Werner performs Solo Pieces from the Fiepblatter Catalogue
16.00   Periodic Composite Waveform Environment Pt 3
Ensemble Neon & Jan St. Werner 
16.30  Dynamische Akustische Forschung & Ensemble Neon & Jan St. Werner 

In collaboration with Henie Onstad Kunstsenter.

Supported by Norsk kulturråd and Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg.

dissolve music – MIT

Dissolve Music @ MIT is a two-and-a-half-day conference and sound festival, March 7-9, 2018, to bring together musicians, sound creators, and scholars of music and sound studies to discuss the diversity of music and experimental sound. Combining art and scholarship in a spirit of dialogue and controversy, the conference aims to dissolve boundaries between different arenas of sonic engagement to identify paths towards alternative, more inclusive futures.

mitdissolve.com

Keynote Speakers

Diana Deutsch (UC San Diego), pioneer in psychoacoustics research and inventor of musical illusions

Thomas F. DeFrantz, professor, African and African American Studies, Duke University, choreographer, author “Dancing Many Drums.”

Organizers:

Jan St. Werner, musician with Mouse on Mars, prof. Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg

Rekha Malhotra, award-winning music producer and activist; M.S. student in Comparative Media Studies

Ian Condry (MIT), cultural anthropologist of Japan, professor at MIT, author “Hip-Hop Japan.”  How do new experiments in music and sound offer possibilities for activating social and political change?

Nicole L’Huilier, sound artist and Ph.D. student at MIT Media Lab, Opera of the Future research group

Walker Downey, writer and Ph.D. student, History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art (HTC), MIT Architecture

Confirmed Participants:

Geeta Dayal, artist/activist and author of Brian Eno’s Another Green World

Oswald Wiener, musician, activist and curator from Vienna, now living in Berlin

Maren Haffke, researcher in Germany working on a project called “The Sound of Order / The Order of Sound”

Sonya Hofer, musicologist specializing in post-WWII musical avant garde

Toni Lester (Babson College), professor and sound artist.  How do issues of author control in music and interpretation help us understand the politics of race, queerness, and free speech

Stefan Helmreich, professor of anthropology, MIT, author “Sounding the Limits of Life”

Nancy Baym, author and researcher in the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, MA

Wayne Marshall, professor at Berklee School of Music, technomusicologist, author & DJ

Patty Tang, ethnomusicologist of Senegalese drumming, and professor in Music and Theater Arts, MIT

Toshiya Ueno, professor Wako U (Japan), author “Urban Tribal Studies,” DJ Toshiya the Tribal

Koichi Sei, sound artist, DJ and owner of Bar Bonobo in Tokyo, Japan, a legendary meeting ground for musicians, sound artists, and DJs

Susanna Bolle, DJ on WZBC and organizer of the Non-Event series of experimental music and sound in the Boston area

Ganavya Doraiswamy, musician and PhD student at Harvard in the Music Department

Rajna Swaminathan, musician an PhD student at Harvard in the Music  Department

DISSOLVE_ONE PAGER_171112

DISSOLVE_fanzine_Final_180420

Spectric Acid – fiepblatter catalogue #5

Spectric Acid, CD, 2017

Jan St. Werner summons flux and fragmentation on Spectric Acid, building up the record’s blistering, locomotive beat structures around the correlation of musical spectra. Their movements triggered in part by peaks in frequency envelopes, rhythms buckle and fracture according to a complex logic that slides past aural perception and harmonic resolution; a “phenomenological alchemy” (Rădulescu) takes shape among unsteady synthesizer whirls and stammering percussive phrases. The effect is deadly, paralytic; but listeners willing to surrender to Spectric Acid’s movement might find themselves taken to wider horizons of trance. Crucially, Werner turned also to the ceremonial rhythms of West Africa in his shaping of Spectric Acid’s bending timescales, and one can hear a clear impress of Vodoo drumming in the way rhythmic patterns cross converse, teeter off-beat, and rapidly redouble.

Though it shares with 2016’s Felder (Fiepblatter Catalogue #4) a desire to spill beyond metric linearity and notated time, Spectric Acid strays from that record’s breathy spatiality towards more pointed concerns with motion and the liberation of rhythm. In pursuit of this new direction, Werner borrows, on the one hand, from the structural techniques championed by the Spectralist school of the 1970s; breaking free of the tempered system through a focus on frequency and timbre, spectral composers like Gérard Grisey and Horațiu Rădulescu introduced sweeping, tectonic temporalities untroubled by notes and intervals, refining what Edgard Varèse before them had evangelized as a fragmentary, atomistic approach to form given to a “[constant] changing in shape, directions, and speed.”

A record both brute in force and exacting in its sensitivity to perception’s effective limits, Spectric Acidoffers fresh glimpses of the deft compositional grasp Werner has developed across over two decades of practice, whether in Mouse on Mars and Microstoria or on his growing log of solo records. Treat it less as a document than a potent sonic distillate, to be taken on an empty stomach for full effect.

– Walker Peterson Downey

Spectric Acid is released on CD only in a hand-numbered edition of 300 copies with an 8 page 5” x 7” booklet designed by Rupert Smyth (co-founder of YYAA Recordings and Hallso Press Editions).  Spectric Acid was mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering in Berlin. Becker said the intense nature of the album meant that to master for LP would “mutilate the spectrum and phase of the material”

http://thrilljockey.com/products/spectric-acid-fiepblatter-catalogue-5

Dynamische Akustische Forschung – Akademie der bildenden Künste nürnberg

Project based class led by Jan St. Werner at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg Germany. DAF explores sound as an unstable art form which merges with other disciplines and yet makes strong claims for disciplinary autonomy. A critical awareness is developed of how sound as a field for artistic exploration is performed, produced, and distributed.

https://daf.adbk-nuernberg.de/

The class explores contemporary and historical practices that emerge outside of purely musical environments and investigates specific compositional developments of post-war modernity and electro-acoustic music, as well as non-musical disciplines related to the psychophysics of hearing and listening. Sound is understood as a means of artistic exploration through practical exercises, performances, installations, writing, recordings, diffusions and instruments building.

In Dynamic Acoustic Research a sound that is perceived – or rather thought – in front of or behind the inner ear, is regarded as equivalent to audible sound. The tool for that is a focus shift of the acoustic range: to search and explore with un-, over- and transdisciplinary methods as a performative self-experiment and with a permanently self-modifying interest, that has no rigidly defined program. Composition is conceived as a finding with maximum attentiveness involving all affects of the perception process.

By means of the concept of the hearing in front of or behind the inner ear a »multi-perspectivity« is applied to the act of hearing – i.e. a sonic art that does not only take place in the ear, but that also makes use of intensive hearing and listening inwards and outwards. In order to achieve this »inter-est« is the matrix of reception in the future: As an artist I will have to ask myself to what extent I am able to invest my inter-est – understood as an intellectual effort – in a structural documentation of real and discursive sounds, for missed, unheard, and outrageous things. How far can we differentiate this inter-est?

Lead by passions (affect, emotion, sensation) and the [calculating] deliberations (intention, reflection, purposefulness). In our researching experiments passions and deliberations should be brought into resonance – an inter-est in the in-between: between the others, the sounds and the devices. For all this Prof. Jan St. Werner favours an interest on the part of the students in a collective process of learning in order to explore something unknown – something undetermined.

Until now the class for Interactive Media / Dynamic Acoustic Research has published a record entitled DAF01. During the Jahresausstellung 2017 sounds arose at the campus were recorded and simultaneously analysed, filtered, interconnected, arranged. By using a mixing desk the students created their individually interpreted melody of the Jahresausstellung. The record sold by A-Musik is also available upon request (akstaller@adbk-nuernberg.de). There is also a cassette tape DAF02 and a print publication DAF03.

Furthermore, the class for Interactive Media / Dynamic Acoustic Research has established a radio station transmitting acoustical experiments. It can be received online via http://81.169.184.35/

https://www.adbk-nuernberg.de/en/studies/artistic-classes/interactive-media-dynamic-acoustics/

https://www.adbk-nuernberg.de/en/academy/professors/jan-st-werner/

 

Glottal Wolpertinger – documenta 14

Glottal Wolpertinger (multi-fragmented composition, commission for documenta 14, 2017)
Jan St. Werner, composition, computer
Aaron Dessner, guitar
Bryce Dessner, prerecorded guitar
Glottal Wolpertinger deconstructs the principle of the musical drone, the timelessly dense, continuously spreading mass of sound, and uses idiosyncratic spatial movements to break with the linear narrative of music. Eight microtonally tuned feedback channels were broadcast via the documenta 14 Radio Program “Every Time A Ear Di Soun” for a period of ten weeks. On July 6, 2017, the feedback channels converged with each other during a performance of Jan St. Werner together with guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner in Athens. The eight compositional fragments each consisted of a continuously modulated feedback based on the harmonic spectrum of Glottal Wolpertinger. The feedback channels resonated at the tuning frequencies of 44 Hz, 133 Hz, 339 Hz, 527 Hz, 826 Hz, 1014 Hz, 1552 Hz, 1889 Hz, 2.3 kHz, 4.6 kHz, 7.15 kHz, 10.14 kHz, 14.873 kHz, and 29.45 kHz. The spatial configuration of these frequencies inside the Romantso space resulted in oscillations, binaural pulses, and sound artifacts that became more or less palpable during the course of the performance depending on the position of the listener. In this way traditional techniques of orientation in a musical experience were pushed beyond the limits of comprehension.

Photo of Jan St. Werner and Aaron Dessner by Stathis Mamalakis – Listening Space, documenta 14, Athens, 2017

Glottal Wolpertinger artwork by Paul McDevitt

Print excerpt from Mousse Magazine #58

documenta14 listening space

documenta14 public radio

A 46 minute collage of the multiple incarnations of Glottal Wolptertinger was commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur

A stereo version of Glottal Wolpertinger called Glossal Wolptertinger as a white CD-R with stamped date, white screen-printed cover on black card sleeve and printed insert plus a limited number of t-shirts and tote bags were released via farbvision.