25. – 29. Oktober 2023
Haus der Kunst, Baden/Wien
10:00-12:00 Uhr & 15:00-18:00 Uhr
„The Roedelius Cells is a multichannel audio installation, created by Grammy-nominated composer Tim Story, and featuring original piano recordings by Hans-Joachim Roedelius. The program is an unconventional cycle of pre-recorded pieces, constructed by Story from thousands of short extracts of Roedelius’ piano recordings, and reproduced via 8 discrete audio channels which surround a listening/gallery space. Since each of the equidistant speakers reproduces a unique layer of each piece, the ‘compositions’ that visitors experience will change individually with their movement through the soundstage, their proximity to the respective monitors, and to other people in the space.
The Roedelius Cells is “an immersive and deeply-satisfying visitor experience” (Scott Boberg, TMA) – it is Story’s poetic reflection of the human mind’s deep search for pattern in the face of entropy; a sly subversion of our notions of authorship and creation; and an elusive, mesmerizing celebration of the legacy of Story’s esteemed friend and collaborator Hans-Joachim Roedelius.
It’s been said of sound art that “one man’s noise is another man’s music.” The Roedelius Cells imagines the possibility that one man’s music might also become “another man’s music.”
In the course of recording several music projects over the past decade, long-time collaborators Tim Story and Hans-Joachim Roedelius captured many hours of Roedelius’ intuitive solo piano improvisations. Rediscovering these extended recordings years later, Story began treating them more as building blocks than finished compositions. Recombining very small edits of this material into layered, evolving patterns, Story painstakingly built compositions solely from the source piano recordings, but which bore little resemblance to Roedelius’ originals. These short, repeating, interlocked layers – consisting of thousands of fragments , each often just a few seconds in duration – create a syncopated, shimmering interplay more reminiscent of Steve Reich’s structured minimalism than Roedelius’ expansive lyricism. Bits of extraneous noise and conversation from the casual sessions occasionally get swept up into the evolving loops, creating a kind of eerie human percussion. To extend the act of ‘re-composition’ to the listeners themselves, Story incorporates a playback system that spreads the individual layers discretely amongst 8 speakers, so that travelling through the physical space changes the fundamental perception of the cells’ interactions in unique, evolving and unrepeatable ways.“
Source: (c) https://www.curiousmusic.us/the-roedelius-cells