EMERGE & Gerald Fiebig: live at villa

Live concert at villa, Augsburg, 2019-08-31 – record release concert for fiction circuit LP

fiction circuit (LP)

by ARTIFICIAL MEMORY TRACE / GERALD FIEBIG / EMERGE / PBK

Artificial Memory Trace aka Slavek Kwi and PBK aka Phillip B. Klingler have been pillars of the global DIY experimental music culture for decades. Both of them have released work on attenuation circuit before. Here, they team up with label owner EMERGE aka Sascha Stadlmeier and his colleague Gerald Fiebig. Each one of the four artists contributes one track of about 10 minutes to the album. But while the four-way split LP is a common format in the global sound culture scene, “fiction circuit” is more than just a compilation.

All of the artists on this album share a love of creating electroacoustic music from field recordings or found sounds. Therefore, label manager Stadlmeier invited Artificial Memory Trace (AMT) and PBK to supply source sounds from their archives. These were then used as the basis for the compositions. Leaving the source material identifiable was not the task – it was to be used as raw material to be sculpted, very much in the spirit of acousmatic musique concrète. On the AMT side, we find the tracks by PBK and Gerald Fiebig. They both used AMT’s source material to create their tracks. PBK delivers a dense, rather rhythmic track with a decidedly “industrial” feel. Fiebig’s track, on the contrary, uses the front cover artwork – a digital collage by EMERGE of visual works by Kwi and Klingler, with other works by them reproduced on the lavishly printed LP insert – as a graphic score for realising a rather harmonic ambient piece. On the PBK side, Artificial Memory Trace and EMERGE “play” the source sounds supplied by PBK. The piece by Artificial Memory Trace qualifies as exuberant rhythm noise, while EMERGE goes all the way into rather meditative laminar lower-case drone minimalism. Therefore, regardless of which side of the record one plays first (“AMT” and “PBK” are engraved on the vinyl itself to guide the listener), one will experience, thoroughout the whole album, a change between very different sonic textures and temperaments that showcase the wide range of expressive possibilities of electroacoustic music. This is not the product of good luck, but of planned collective composition: AMT and PBK, as the “guests” on the label, were invited to create whatever they liked without any formal restrictions. As it turned out, both of their works were rather intense and direct in character. Therefore, EMERGE and Fiebig both made an effort to complement each side with a more subdued, quiet piece.

File under: Electroacoustic music, musique concrète

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Soundscape und Aura. Zur Verortung und Entortung von Field Recordings in der zeitgenössischen Audiokunst

This essay (in German) was written for a volume accompanying an exhibition at D21 Kunstraum Leipzig exploring the possibility of addressing social and political aspects of the contemporary cityscape through soundworks. It discusses works by Jacob Kirkegaard, Peter Cusack, Biosphere, Stéphane Garin/Sylvestre Gobart, Artificial Memory Trace, Mirt, Frans de Waard, and Zander/Fiebig in order to show different strategies for decontextualising and recoding sounds of specific sites.

Der Aufsatz wurde geschrieben für den Sammelband „Verortungen/Entortungen. Urbane Klangräume“ zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung im D21 Kunstraum Leipzig. Mit welchen unterschiedlichen Strategien der Klang spezifischer Orte de- und rekontextualisiert werden kann, untersucht der Text an Arbeiten von Jacob Kirkegaard, Peter Cusack, Biosphere, Stéphane Garin/Sylvestre Gobart, Artificial Memory Trace, Mirt, Frans de Waard und Zander/Fiebig.

Artificial Memory Trace / EMERGE / Gerald Fiebig: Intercept

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