Reviews
ReviewsA key is turning in a lock, a door is being pushed open agressively, a car is driving by - very simple sounds which are beginning to fray increasingly, becoming more artificial like in a computer game, accumulating waves of sound, which billow through the room; various arms of noises start building up in the wings of the room and joining in sound-whirls in the acoustic center only to disembogue in one final organ sound, which is filling up the room inch by inch. Onset/Offset by Pete Stollery is a palpable piece of electronic music. An excellent example how sounds can be put in a room in such a presence, that it almost feels like they are taking physical shape.
A number of such impressive webs of sound were cavorting through the ZKM-cube: The composer Pippa Murphy, since this summer a "composer in residence" at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie - ZKM (centre for art and media technology), gave her closing concert. Pippa Murphy has specialised in elcetronic music. She is a member of the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) and has a university teaching position with the universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. She worked at the ZKM for three months.
In the ZKM-concert, including 23 loudspeakers, she interpreted electronic music of her own and of other composers including the composition that she developed during her time in Karlsruhe. Not all pieces on the night were as palpable as Onset/Offset but all of them were comprising recognisable and tangible sounds whichgave them a starightforward freshness. Electronic music can even be somewhat anarchic. For example Cheap Music by Richard Whitelaw uses sounds of handcrafted or tinkered instruments.If you happen to have played the trumpet on a garden hose for fun before or ever squeezed a balloon to make it squeak, you get a pretty good idea what Whitelaw's basic raw material must have sound like. The result: a cheeky collage with painstakingly squeezed croaking sounds, gasping respirative sounds and their interpreted alienation which roamed through the room and the speakers - put on stage ingeniously and elaborately.
Pippa Murphy's own compositions on the contrary are more contemplative. She is not chasing her audience with sound-shapes but sending outsounds on a voyage which the listeners are invited to follow. In Caspian Retreat she uses sounds and noises from Teheran: cars driving by, honking cars, Mullahs singing their Sures throughover-pitched speakers and the rushing and splashing of the sea. All of this is getting condensed to a kind of acoustic essence of the city.The centre piece of the concert night was Pippa Murphy's composition ofher work in Karlsruhe (the sound material was produced with genuine Karlsruhan sand and pebbles!). Voix du Sable (voices of the sand) was the most intimate and elaborate piece on the concert night. The idea originated from a poem; Pippa Murphy created a sound novel of it. She forms whispering and jabbering voices, rustling and crackling sand to gentle three-dimensional sound shape in which the listener follows the arcane and overreaching sounds and stochastic rhythms. An enriching soiree.
by Wibke Bantelman
translation by Thomas Kling
JWB 11th Dec. 03
©2003
