GOD 10
Winfried Ritsch
Woodscratcher
Picture LP
This release turns out to be the best way to celebrate little GODrec
anniversary:
the tenth release of the label!
Woodscratcher (Scratching Wood) is a composition and sound generating
machine from Austrian composer, media-artist, sound-sculptor and performer,
Winfried Ritsch.
Already known as collaborator in different projects with Bernhard Lang
(pieces from his series Differenz/Wiederholung, Trike), Peter Ablinger
(Klavierautomat), Ritsch created “my own dedication to noise pieces of
experimental music from 70s onwards”.
This machine cuts a 2-5cm thick disk of a wooden trunk in a circular
line along the growth rings of the wood, which makes this nothing else then monumental turntable.
At the
same time, the wood is amplified with four pickups (sensors) and the signals
picked from microphones are spatialized over four loudspeakers in the corners of
the room which spans acoustically the slice of the wood. This scratching in the
concert is done until the inner part of the disk falls to the ground and the piece
ends.
The
movement of the cutting tool behaving like an over-sized record player needle,
has the performing function and is an allusion of the production of records, as
well as playing them. The woodscratcher pretends to extract and play the
information which resides in the piece of wood cutting it in an excessive
performance. The wood is heard as acoustic material with inhomogeneities annual
rings by superimposing a loops of the cutting process.
With the
progression of the cutting process the sounds evolves of the pieces in more and
more rubbing and squeezing sounds. The audio signal filter functions of the
wood is heard like repeatedly changing formants, almost imaging voices in the
noise.
Composition
With this
performances not only the machine as performer is broached as the issue, also
the exploration of unknown material is an artistic statement as also defining
the structured and timing of the piece. The aesthetics lies in the excessive
performance beyond feasible by a human actor or musician and also, links the
many possible associations and associative to the world of music performance. One
of them is the sound based on the noise
of the experimental music pieces since the 70s and another with ideas of
Herbert Bruen's computer music project sawdust
from that time, when the rejection of oscillators as a tone generator for free
definition of single events down to the scale of samples as a liberation of
note-oriented Music generation.
The
transition in algorithmic composition to the composition of processes as
instrument like done in live composition is expanded to the construction of a
mechanical machine which is the live composer. The main aspect of this is that
the process does the composing and the machine is composed for executing the
process of extracting the piece out of the disc of wood, destroying it and
defining the audible result of the piece. So composer becomes a mechanical
engineer and inventor of machines and the musician the operator as machinist.
The picture vinyl release is vinyl simulation of woodscratcher: a vinyl
record has a picture of a wood on itself and recorded sound of scratching the
wood.
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