ONLY CONNECT FESTIVAL OF SOUND 2018
Bauckholt + Kubisch remixed
FRIDAY 25 MAY 22:00 Marmorsalen, Sentralen
German composers Carola Bauckholt and Christina Kubisch are both keen listeners of hidden sounds, although in quite different ways. Their collaboration spawned off a 2013 meeting as members of the music section of Akademie der Künste Berlin. The idea to reuse their respective material, to sample and remix them into new compositions was soon born, resulting in a joint program premiered in Amsterdam in 2017.
- It was a close, fruitful and intense collaboration, which made us discover acoustic worlds that were new to us, comments Christina Kubisch.
At Only Connect we are first presented two works from their regular catalogue, followed by the two made in this collaborative manner. The programme is performed by musicians from the contemporary music ensembles Cikada and Oslo Sinfonietta.
PROGRAMME Christina Kubisch Seven Magnetic Places (2016/2017) (13’) Carola Bauckholt Laufwerk (2011) (12’) Christina Kubisch Wien Landstraße (2016/2017) (18’) Carola Bauckholt Point of Presence (2016/2017) (16’)
Christina Kubisch Seven Electromagnetic Places (2016/2017) This electroacoustic piece is made from electromagnetic recordings made worldwide in different cities. They were gathered in airports, shopping malls, offices, in streets and underground stations, trains and trams, near power generators and data centres etc. in Las Vegas, Osaka, Paris, Lagos, Bangkok, Amsterdam, Turku, Berlin, Ekaterinburg, Košice and many other places. The sounds are superimposed, cut and looped but not treated electronically. It’s a portrait of the electrical and digital world around us that is as if hidden under cloaks of invisibility, but of incredible presence.
Carola Bauckholt Laufwerk (2011) In German a “Laufwerk” is today most often used to refer to the part of a computer that accesses digital data on storage media. A Laufwerk is also the part of the clockwork in a mechanical clock that couples the power source (mainspring or pulley) to the timekeeping element (pendulum or balance wheel).
For the work Laufwerk, Bauckholt imagined loops of prerecorded sounds that faded in and out of the ensemble. Most of the samples used in the piece are sounds generated by the instruments. Each sound can be seen as independent clockwork that maintains its own tempo, which generates a multidimensional object. These different mechanisms join together to form a single meta-organism: an ensemble.
Christina Kubisch Wien Landstraße (2016/2017) For Wien Landstraße, Kubisch has chosen small fragments out of Bauckholt’s recorded compositions. The samples were re-orchestrated and treated in different ways by changing the rhythm, the dynamics, number of repetitions of the sequences, and the notation. The other parts of the piece are Kubisch’s own electromagnetic recordings. The performing musicians are in a dialogue (or not) with the electromagnetic sound world. It’s a strange encounter of two worlds which are both real.
"Wien Landstraße" is the name of an underground train station in Vienna, where Kubisch has made many recordings with a special headphone which only records the electrical waves, not the acoustic sounds, of the location. The light systems, in- and outgoing trains, as well as many other electrical systems generate the magnetic fields. They create a soundscape that is different from the soundscape we usually hear in a train station. The electromagnetic sounds have something musical but they are clearly "from another world".
Carola Bauckholt Point of Presence (2016/2017) The title Point of Presence describes, on the one hand, the intense and ever increasing presence of the invisible and inaudible electromagnetic fields that surround us today. On the other hand, the point of presence (PoP) is a node in a communication system. At a point of presence, data and voice traffic from different networks meet. For this piece Bauckholt used twelve of Christina Kubisch’s recordings of electromagnetic fields, and transcribed them for instruments:
- To my surprise these found sonic objects are sometimes very harmonic and rhythmic, as if they had already been composed by some invisible presence. My task was to simply capture and work out their idiosyncrasies. They are simply thrust into another light and occupy a different context, just as the ensemble and the concert situation are questioned and illuminated from new perspective, says Bauckholt about the composition.
The piece was written for Nieuw Ensemble, Amsterdam.
Carola Bauckholt (b. 1959, Krefeld) is a German composer. She studied composition at the Musikhochschule Köln with Mauricio Kagel from 1978 to 1984. In 2013, she was elected as a member of Akademie der Künste in Berlin and in 2015, she was appointed as professor of composition with focus on contemporary music theatre at the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität in Linz, Austria.
A central theme of Bauckholt's work is the examination of the phenomena of perception and understanding. Her compositions often blur the boundaries between visual arts, musical theater and concert music. She is especially fond of using noisy sounds, which are often produced by unconventional means (such as extended instrumental techniques or bringing everyday objects to the concert hall).
Christina Kubisch (b. 1948, Bremen), has studied painting, composition and electronic music in Hamburg, Graz, Zurich and Milan. Her work includes sound installations, sound sculptures, video and performance as well as electroacoustic compositions and audio works for radio. Kubisch belongs to the first generation of sound artists.
She has artistically developed multiple techniques based on electromagnetic induction, solar energy and special light systems. Her site-specific work often includes the participation of the public.