Music for Commons Sensed++

With central spark in the dark and Martial Partial, their new piece for percussion and electronics, musicians Dirk Rothbrust and Jan St. Werner push their creative and performative energies to the limit. central spark in the dark explores and enlivens the relationships between electronics and acoustics, between sound from loudspeakers and percussive instruments, between reflections in the room and the soundscape in the listener’s mind. The multi-channel mix allows the compositional elements an expanded spatiality in which every spark could be the centre of a sonic universe.

Martial Partial intensifies this sonic language, moving at the fringes of organisation, chaos, and playability. Rhythmic structures condense, fragment, and break apart, while sonic identities disintegrate. This piece explores those fleeting, often overlooked microseconds in which a sound first becomes audible before it can be clearly defined. These beginnings are magnified, dissected and hurled into the performance space in explosive, microscopically processed sounds. The result is an ever-changing soundscape that evokes spatial reflections and perceptual disturbances, activating the space itself as a living instrument.

Sine Field explores the interaction between two very different sound sources: bagpipes and electronics. The frequency spectrum of Erwan Keravec’s bagpipes is mirrored and expanded by a stream of electronic sounds from Jan St. Werner. The electronic signal evokes otoacoustic emissions – subtle acoustic reactions triggered in the inner ear by intense and precisely tuned frequencies.

Nicolas Morrish’s composition Midwinter for bagpipes and multi-channel electronics explores harsh, non-linear feedback elements, developing them into tonal textures that give rise to hybrid electronic-acoustic sound phenomena. Midwinter considers the ancient artistic practice of bagpipes from the perspective of current electronic technology and aesthetics. Social aspects of instrumental playing, which combines different blowing techniques from different cultures, weave their way through the multifaceted composition like threads.

Erwan Keravec also presents Wolfgang Mitterer’s Attacca. In his works, Mittlerer develops a language marked by extreme tension and complexity, letting them oscillate between composition and open form.  Characteristic features include the combination of contrasting elements, including those from different musical languages, and the constant search for unpredictable musical moments.