2006-2007
Abandonee was premiered on the 26.06.2007 in the CUBE of the IEM in Graz.
The composition was featured in January and February 2009 at the DEGEM webradio and in May 2009 at SWR2 – Musik spezial: RADIOPHON. In addition, Abandonee was invited in 2009 to the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.
A double CD was produced in the summer of 2008.
For a total of 15 months we worked with the sound art ensemble NooK – Dirk Specht and gksh – on the ambisonic space-sound composition Abandonee. The composition was completed between May and the end of June 2007 in the Ambisonic concert hall and studio CUBE of the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, Graz. The institute had invited us as guest composer. For the realization we were supported by the DAAD through a graduate-foreign scholarship.
The production is a spatialized-electroacoustic composition using the technical potential of the Ambisonic System of the Cube at IEM Graz. The sound material for this composition is taken from a (sur)real situation. It consists of the repeatedly carried out miking of a particular resonating system and of its situation within its surrounding space. For this purpose we used a soundfield-microphone, several accelerometers, piezo-electric transducers and Schoeps condenser-microphones. The resonating system that has been recorded in that way is a destroyed grand piano (Blüthner company, Leipzig), left behind on an abandoned construction site in Belgium. Weather influences and vandalism have destroyed the grand piano to a great extent: the keys are quarried out, the chords are partly broken, the timber frame is distorted, parts of the wood are completely missing or else broken off, burst and scattered throughout the whole room. The former instrument can still be recognized as such. Yet, through the described influences, it has been transformed to something different that resembles the original resonating object only remotely. We tested this sound-producing object at the place of discovery for its new characteristics and thereby concentrated mainly on the sound-space aspects and potential as well as on its acoustic effect in its current location. The acoustic situation that we found disintegrates, by our means of miking and playing the instrument, into points in time and points of stimulation. These have been newly arranged both technically and artistically as well as transformed dynamically at the Ambisonic Studio of IEM later on.
The inside and outside (i. e. the surrounding space) of the resonating object have been fanned out in the sound-space-composition by means like
spatial fragmentation / displacement / different levels cutting into each other / diffusion / selective contrasting / frictions and assuming changing spatial conditions: agglomeration / merging / equalising / stretching / contracting / blurring.
For documentation of the work a binaural stereo recording was made (dummy head recording) in order to make the hearing impression of the artistic sound-space organisation of this project comprehensible. Of course, such a hearing situation is only to be understood as a substitute. However, this type of documentation had already proven useful in the previous Aubaine project as a basis for discussion and as a presentation aid with regard to the artistic work with modern space-sound systems.
