AGF - commissioned work (2019)

This album is quite gentle I hope, with a few exceptions. In the last years I have been commissioned audio pieces under remarkable circumstances and I did not want to loose them to rotting hard drives. As the album title states, it is about work. Writing, performing, handling music is work. I mean that in an absolute Marxist sense. The works were written for a specific purpose like radio, theater, classical ensemble, contemporary dance, installations, film and video work. With permission of the commissioners the pieces have been thoroughly reworked for this release and are now compressed "moods" of the originals or some are processes and combinations. Making this release was more complicated than expected and made me think about "composition" in general and how I perceive it. I drew it out on the cover artwork: position - sound - composition. Along the process it manifested the practice of sculpting audio, my process of "writing" music is closer to poetry or sculpture than the one of a classic composer or musician. Important steps like research, thinking, building a context, forming a position, collecting sound within the context, sound design, purpose, attitude, politics and eventually crafting something that is narrative or listenable in the format it is presented. I spent a lot of time finding the right tracklisting to allow a dynamic interesting listening experience of the entire work. As an electronic composer I used diverse sampling techniques, field recordings, my voice and multiple layers of digital processing and eventually mixing and mastering. One will hear machine sounds like an East German grass cutter, a 3D food printing machine, syringes, bells, human chatter, one will hear the endangered tree-dwelling mammal species Indri "singing" a song, sonified mushrooms going wild, mycelium compositions, police dogs smelling data, ice hockey recordings from the ice court in Hailuoto (Finland), where kids play all winter only when they do not play Fortnite, one can hear rural field recordings and my body amplified with a contact microphone. Melody on this record is minimal and derived from the field, rather led towards dissonance as a form of resistance to harmony. Thanks for listening, Listening is a political activity and is the ground work for justice.

Finally, I want to thank radio ORF & Elisabeth Zimmermann, Nanotechnology Center INL & exhibition space gnrations Braga, the choreographer & dancer Sergiu Mattis, Deutschlandradio Kultur & Marcus Gammel, Christine Mellich from Konzerthaus Berlin, artist/builder Dasha Herwitt & Universität der Künste Berlin, curator and cultural fascilitator Luis Costa & Binaural Nodar, interdisciplary artist, smell designer & film maker Leanne Wijnsma, Anna Ramos & Radio MACBA and many more for giving me work.