Abbreviations (PDF)
B&B
I am a re-active composer, which means that I re-act to what immediately occupies me, surrounds me or happens to me.
My compositions therefore partly make intertextual references to other works, spin already existing sound worlds further, or comment on them and conduct virtual dialogues.
I am fundamentally interested in establishing connections: to other times, to other works, to other artists.
In this respect, my composing always takes place in certain contexts – the other, as YOU, as a counterpart, is always present, be it in direct performativity or as a resonance space. In a way, this form of intertextuality can be understood as a counter-category to the concept of authorship.
In HYPER-DUB, too, connections and references are in the foreground. Thus this composition would not have come into being without the surprising encounter with Dirk von Lowtzow and his wonderful text, without the enriching conversations, without the amazement about similar preferences, about philosophers or artists.
And without this encounter it might not have occurred to me to work with the recording of an ancient MS-20 sound, which holds the whole piece together like putty, which colors it microtonally, but which also brings in a trace of historicity.
A broken sound (mainly a somewhat too-low E, which also modulates strangely in itself), the result of a spontaneous desire to experiment with the MS-20 synthesizer –so influential during the late 1970s and 80s – by the legendary Chrislo Haas (1956-2004, among others DAF, Liaisons Dangereuses), who unfortunately died much too early. Chrislo Haas had sent this through the defective space echo of musician and sound expert Thomas Stern (*1957, among others Crime and the City solution, Berliner Ring), who very fortunately recorded this experiment and gave it to me decades later, for further processing.
HYPER-DUB is in three parts. In the first part, I layer various lines or even melody fragments on top of the sound and let them partly merge into each other like magma. This creates a peculiar sonority in which recognizable things flash up again and again, but at the same time seem to be slipping. In the second part, the voice and the text are given the space, while in the third part the hybrid instrument "drumset" takes center stage and gives the sound and text a completely different meaning.
What struck me so much about this broken, strange sound that it has now found its way into HYPER-DUB as a recurring sample?
Maybe that it reminds me of the early 80s in Berlin? Of the resistant and experimental mood that fascinated me so much about this city back then, that I decided from one day to the next to move there and throw myself into the experimental rock music scene?
Perhaps that I involuntarily associated it with my attitude to life at the time, i. e. with a period of lived resistance (as a reminder: in the early 1980s, almost 160 houses were occupied within a few months in what was then West Berlin, thus gradually "reoccupying" buildings that had been in disrepair for years and had long since been left to decay by their owners and politicians. Thus, among other things, was Kreuzberg 36 "saved" for a new future – when it otherwise would have fallen victim to politics in conjunction with speculators, in the hope of lucrative business and profitable margins in view of a then-planned highway across this neighborhood).
Or above all, that it evoked in me the question (which has been bothering me for quite a while): what has remained of this "lived" resistance, the supposed awakening in those days (the women’s movement, anti-nuclear movement, climate movement, squats, Neue Deutsche Welle before its commercialization, etc.)?
In other words: what of those "futures" – imagined at that time – which have been lost over time or have not materialized into the 21st century? And: at what point was the belief in a better and fairer future displaced by the realization that everything, really everything, every movement, including resistance, will be "swallowed" by the excesses of capitalism?
Iris ter Schiphorst, 2022 (translation: SWR)