In this project I aim to find approaches to creating music that are new to me. For six months I am going to go out once a week to do field recordings from which I will create musical sketches back in my studio. Those will, in most cases, not be finished pieces but unpolished musical ideas. For me as an artist, this acts as an experiment. I want to explore, and see what new ideas, concepts and techniques I will come up with, when I am forced to publish something new each week. In order to make the whole process as transparent as possible, I will not only upload the finished pieces but also provide the raw field recordings, the sample libraries I create from them and the Ableton sessions I do my compositions in.

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts about this project - please don’t hesitate to get in contact

week #20

week #19

week #18

It is new year’s eve today and I am uploading the second reference to John Cage during the course of this project.

This time last year I was working on a little project called observing silence where I combined sounds and video images that, for me, represented silence. At the end of this year I had to think about this again and decided to include the sounds of observing silence within a day in the week of.

Silence is a fascinating phenomenon. Especially since, in its purest form – the absence of sound –, it does not exist on this planet. Whenever we experience silence, it is a subjective state in which we always still perceive some form of sound or ambient noise. In that sense, silence simply is a shade of noise and noise is a shade of silence. And both – noise and silence – inherit a beauty, that we seldom give credit enough. This, I want to chance for myself. So my resolution for 2022 is to regularly take time out of my schedule to just sit and listen and observe silence.

week #17

Time was very limited this week. I didn’t get to going out and do my field recordings. So I decided to do a little experiment and use one of my least favourite “pieces” from this project as the source material for a new creation. I Played around with some sound design ideas and came up with a new method for creating a click-rhythm (and I am absolutely in love with click rhythms). In the end there just simply wasn’t enough time to actually put this into a context of something I would like to listen to. But, the rules of the project are very clear - something new has to be published every week…

week #16

Sometimes one tiny little sample gives you enough material to create a whole piece from it. Today’s musical sketch uses a sound of something falling over during the buildup for a concert I organized together with my wonderful colleague Benni Grau at artheater Cologne.

week #15

There is nothing to show for week #15. I was sick and spent most of my time on my couch, drinking tea and watching mindless television series.

week #14

week #13

If you own a analogue mixer, you don’t neet anyhting but a couple of cables to create wild sounds. No input mixing is a technique, where you create a feedback loop within a mixer, utilizing and manipulating it’s inherent noise. Just twist some knobs and you will instantaneously get the most unexpected sounds. Beware though – keep the levels low, otherwise it can get extremely loud and potentially not only fry your ears but your gear as well. I used no input mixing quite a bit during my first year at the Amsterdam conservatory. This week I dusted off my old mixer, wired it up, put my fingers on the potentiometes and just had fun.

week #12

week #11

If you are interested in sound, maybe even with a special interest in the sounds that surround us each and every day, I’d like two suggest an experiment: Grab yourself a mobile recording device, put on some headphones (preferably closed over-ear headphones), crank up the volume, go to a busy place and just listen (places of transit e.g. airports, train stations etc. work marvellously). Once you are back home, play the recording you have made through your loudspeakers (please use a proper stereo setup. Boomboxes, due to their mono-directionality, won’t cut it). Close your eyes and, again, listen. Listen to cars, trains and busses running right through your living room, listen to strangers talk, catching snippets of their conversations, listen to that space you have just transported into a totally different context. It is a wild, surreal and utterly beautiful experience – if you open yourself up to it.

Another thing I would suggest is to listen to what John Cage has to say about music and silence. There is plenty of great material online – check it out! Every sentence is a revelation! In an interview, conducted in April 1991, Cage is sitting in his New York apartment, the noise of the busy Manhattan traffic entering through the open window – and he sais: “The sound experience I prefer to all others (pause) is the experience of silence. And silence, almost everywhere in the world now, is traffic.” For a long time I couldn’t understand this point of view - until I conducted the abovementioned experiment for the first time. In that spirit, this week’s piece is simply a 4 minute, 33 second long fragment of a recording I made at Cologne central station yesterday.

week #10

One of my favourite hobbies is building stuff. Making things with my hands is just so rewarding. Since I have moved into my beautiful little apartment in the heart of Cologne, I finally have a dedicated workshop in my basement – It’s amazing! More and more this passion of mine is finding it’s way into my professional work as well. In week #7 and #8 we heard sounds from instruments that I have built myself and this week I spent some time soldering up a little device that allows me to record the sounds of electric currents. This electric current is something we usually don’t hear, although we are surrounded by electronic devices constantly. All the more exciting it is to make this usually inaudible electricity audible. For this week’s sketch I recorded the devices inside my studio and left the samples basically untouched. I wanted to see what the raw, noisy recordings would sound like. In the future I will probably do more field recording using this technique and do some more heavy processing on the samples. 

week #9

week #8

Something else was different this week: We are actually not in week#8 yet. Since I’m going on holidays tomorrow, I had to do two pieces in week #7, in order to keep up with my upload schedule. For this piece I stayed with my instrument_N, but instead of hitting them with mallets I took a cello bow to them. Using bows on percussion instruments is a commonly used technique, which, in most cases, produces very beautiful, clean sounds. instrument_N plus bow however is quite noisy. It’s possible to clean up the samples in order to get a dreamy, etheric sound, and I used to do this in the past. But this time I took another route by not touching the samples at all (apart from cutting them). I wanted to hear what kind of sound world unfolds if I leave all the grime and grit of the original samples in place. To create the piece I used the same generative patch as last time, but I added a few things (which can be found in the ableton session) and live-tweaked certain parameters while recording.

week #7

A lot was different this week. After I had experimented with generative melodies a bit last week, I wanted to spend some more time in this realm. And I wanted to do it with a sound I know very well and particularly love. It stems from instrument_N, which I built during my studies in Amsterdam. The steel bars produce an un-pitched but incredibly rich sound of overlaying frequencies, slightly reminiscent to that of an fm-bell. I decided to not sample those sounds this week, since I already have plenty of good recordings of the instruments and it just didn’t make sense to re-record them. I hope you enjoy this world of sound as much as I do.

week #6

This was a tricky one. On Thursday there was a big deadline and Sunday I wanted to keep free. This meant that I had only Friday and a few hours on Saturday to work on the piece. To get some audio material quickly and easily I recorded the noise of my building’s ventilation. I worked most of Friday on something that was going into the direction of a dancy, technoid track. In the evening I realised that there was just no way of getting this thing ready in time. So I started over on Saturday morning. I used the oldest trick in the book and looped a very small section of my recording to create a synth. The idea was to play with generative melodies and microtonality/detuning. So I programmed a little Max for Live device that allows me to randomly change the Ableton simpler’s detune control for each note. The outcome is two miniatures. For the first one I used an euclidean pattern generator. For the second one I wrote another Max for Live device, which creates random melodies.

week #5

Most days I spend many hours at my desk, sitting down. I try to counteract this lack of movement by doing a lot of sports. One of those activities is a badminton group on wednesday evenings. This is where I got this week’s recording from. I really like the approaches and sounds in this one and I would have enjoyed more time to work on the piece. I will definitely keep #5 in mind and come back to it at a later point. 

week #4

Something I particularly love about field recordings, is that there can be a tremendous amount of sonic richness in just a single sample, simply due to the stuff that’s going on in the background – noise, essentially. I spent this week in Trier, visiting my mother and working on a project with a choreographer/performer (the piece will be premiered in Sept 2022). The recording was made at the cathedral and the piece is the result of just one long sample of processed background noise of people visiting the cathedral. 

week #3

I am still not sure if this one is particularly interesting or just incredibly lazy. I spent the weekend at a techno-festival. Being over 30, my body (and mind) take some time to bounce back from such hedonistic endeavours . Thus I was looking for a simple way to meet my self-imposed deadline – and what would be easier then using last week’s piece and simply exchange the sounds? To do that I used a videoclip I shot on my iPhone during the Festival. I created a bunch of clicks, beeps and other percussive sounds. I think it is mission accomplished. This project is a way for me to explore new techniques including such that allow me to work fast and efficiently, which is exactly what happened here. 

week #2

It was a hectic week. I had a friend staying over and I couldn’t find the time for a long field recording session. So I decided to just, very quickly, record the sounds of my motorcycle. I was convinced that this would give me plenty of great audio material. I was mistaken – I disliked almost all the sounds. I ended up making the piece from my licence plate’s resonance. This week, same as last one, I struggled to free myself from my usual approaches, which, again, resulted in a few failed attempts and scrapped ideas. The finished piece is a reich-esque, polymetric miniature. If you choose to listen to it, please wear headphones. The EQ-ing is horrible and if you listen to the piece through speakers the mids will build up to an unbearably annoying degree.

week #1

The start of a new project. Making field recordings is always fun. Experiencing your surroundings through the exaggerated auditive perspective of microphones that amplify sounds and send those to your ears directly through headphones is quite surreal. Like a magnifying glass for your ears. The start to this project was a bit bumpy. My initial thought – you’re going to sit down for a couple of hours, throw together a few sounds and call it a day – turned into three full days and multiple failed ideas (all of which are still in the Ableton project file). After an extensive sound design session (I love sound design) I ended up creating almost the whole piece from just one short sample of me hitting a metal rail in the park. Only the glitch sounds are made from different samples.