The Paiva river collection

Since the early beginnings of my sound & music making I have been collecting found material. This was either sampled footage/field recordings or more often abandoned instruments, waste or junk objects which were then used as soundmakers. An important part of this collection processes was always taken by little things found innature, like leaves, stones, dry woods, bark, seeds, dry flowers, various shells, sand,…

Since about 2004 I have made a quite extreme shift back wards to the turn table as a main instrument after becoming in creasingly tired by using digital hard-and software mainly out of frustration that those were more and more dominating my daily life. Within this process I started to completely focus on the found objects andmy collections have become the main source of sound production as they are directly played on the metal plate of the turn table and which are only amplified with a small condenser microphone. Especially organic materials like dry flowers or leaves proved to have a huge potential to produce extremely rich soundscapes and they have gained a great importance in my catalog of objects. Quite recently I was touring in Australia where because of very strict restrictions of the bio quarantine it was not possible to bring any organic materials into the country. Out of this reason I could not bring some of my very important organic sound makers and I decided to use material which I found on walks in parks or gardens in the cities of Brisbane, Melbourne, Castelmaine & Cairns. By finding completely new & unique materials from trees and plants I had never seen before a completely new and unique catalog of sounds with a very interesting potential came out and after a few days of research and practice I started to know how to handle and play them. By going through this quite amazing experience my idea and wish arose to do a future series of works which completely focus on a given topography and to entirely research and work with the site specific found organic materials and objects. These objects can be anything natural from stones, dry grass, leaves, flowers, small branches, driftwood, bark, shells, seeds,…

The idea for my project at Nodar would be to do extensive daily walks and explorations on the entire Paiva River valley and shores for about the first 7-10 days of the residency and to collect all kinds of different organic materials which can we found and to bring them back to the studio where I will be doing intensive research & experiments on them to learn and find out about their sonic possibilities. All this activity will be cataloged and documented and a sort of score/list will be compiled which becomes like an archive and pool of possibilities. In the last 4-5 the collected materials will be molded into two different bodies of work:

1) a sound installation in which an example of each found object will be used. The characteristics of the installation will be similar to Little Stells or Ghosts/Vibrations (see attached photo documentation). The sound making objects are mounted to nylon strings which again are connected to the membranes of speakers which transfer the vibration of low sinewaves to the strings and put the objects in resonance & vibration…

2) A composition which will be performed live by the artists using entirely found organic materials from the Paiva River region. The performance will be mainly performed with the artists “rotating surfaces” set-up which means that the objects are played directly on the rotating plate of the turn table and that their resonance vibrations are just simply amplified with a small condensator microphone. Like this I want to create a sonic topography of the river valley which is not directly referring to the usual and known soundscape which can be heard by everyone on their walks and which can be of course captured in classical soundscape/field recording compositions. The idea is more to create a more or less abstract metalevel of a sonic topography from the given environment by having a kind of close-up microscopic view into some of this lanscapes` natural components and their hidden sonic potentials…The idea is going to start a new series of works which goes back to anolder block of site specific works of mine called “Metaflexes” (which was drawing portraits of mainly urban areas with all its specific soundscapes) and is supposed to create a kind of work in progress which should sonically portrait very diverse natural environments. In this series the Paiva River Collection could be the pilot version. As most of the found objects will be played on the turntable it could be crucial that the used material should be of a very dry consistency. (For this it would be very helpful if my residency period would take place in the very dry season (summer, autumn??).

Turntablist, sound artist, performer & composer. In his youth he studied the saxophone and performed in free jazz and avant rock bands. At the same time he was getting obsessed with multitrack tape machines, record players and effect boxes and he started experimenting with many different instruments and sound making devices. After college he briefly studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and worked for several years as an assistant for the contemporary composer Josef Anton Riedl. Since the late 1995 he works and lives in Berlin where he became an activeand integral force of the so-called “Berlin Nouvelle Vague” and the blossoming “realtime music” scene. From the middle of the nineties on wards his interest and activities almost completely shifted towards live-electronics and after testing various instrumentations (hard-& software samplers, signal processing, contact mics, field recordings, …) he developed his own and quite unique electro-acoustic set-up which he calls “rotating surfaces”. Various objects and materials (from wood, metal, plastic, paper or violin bows and cymbals) are played directly on the rotating metal plate of the turntable and the vibrations are simply amplified with a small condenser microphone. With this set-up he uncovers many different styles of contemporary experimental music–ranging from extreme reductionism via ambient, industrial, musique concrete, electronica to harsh noise. Besides his favorite setting – the direct duo-confrontation with the likes of Chris Abrahams (AUS), Andrea Belfi (I), Alexei Borisov (RUS), Sebastian Buczek (PL), Phil Durrant (GB), Gunnar Geisse (D), GX Jupitter-Larsen/The Haters (USA), Dawid Szczesny (PL), Martin Tetreault (CAN), Marcel Tuerkowsky (D) or Sabine Vogel (D) – he is member and founder of many different ensembles like Perlonex, Snake Figures Arkestra, Phosphor, Blind Snakes, Decollage, Berlin Sound Connective, N.I.E.,… He has collaborated with numerous international artists (most notably Don Cherry & Charlemagne Palestine) and touredand performed clubs & festivals all over Eastern-and Western Europe, Australia, Finland, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, Russia, Ukraine & the US. He released many albums on labels like Zarek, Edition Zangi, edition x, Irrah, Potlatch, Bad Alchemy, Charhizma, Staalplaat, Nexsound, Non Visual Objects, Improvised Music From Japan or Absinth and he was part of radio broadcasts and productions for ORF-Kunstradio, ORF-Zeitton, BR2, DLR, DLF, WDR3, DRS2 or Radio Copernicus (…) Further more he has been curating festivals of experimental music from the early 90 sonwards (FAM, Erase & Reset, Tim Shifts, The International Turntable Orchestra, (…) Since 2005 he has created several sound installations & environments.