Dr. Hanno Ehrler
Making the inaudible audible …
“…Thus, in the understanding of the artist couple, the sounds of nature are located beyond musical traditions and thus differ fundamentally from the usual “musical”, man-made sounds, be they instrumental or electronic. They elude musical traditions, a music-historical embeddedness that is inherent to any other sound material. Sabine Schäfer and Joachim Krebs ascribe to the sounds of nature a “universal character that transcends all political and cultural boundaries”. In order to preserve this character in their artistic work, the two composers try to intervene as little as possible in the sounds of nature, not to manipulate them, to let them speak for themselves.
They therefore do not call the technical procedures to which they subject the material processing, but use other terms. They “molecularize” the sounds by temporal stretching and deep transposition; they “fragmentarize” them by cutting out small pieces from the temporally stretched sounds and placing them in repeat loops; and they “elementarize” them by attenuating or intensifying certain parameters, on the one hand to eliminate what is disturbing, and on the other hand to make the essential aspects of a sound more transparent. In analogy to the optical, this is an enlargement and a sharpening without a fundamental change of the source material.
Of particular importance are the inner sound spaces that open up during microscopy, during “audio slow motion”. Every single sound element has an in and out oscillation and a certain reverberation behavior, which now appears magnified and intensified. It represents the ambience contained in an insect or bird voice, the atmosphere in which the voice is embedded. These atmospheres, like all the other enlarged and sharpened sound snippets, are now the elements of the actual composition process. They function as material building blocks that Sabine Schäfer and Joachim Krebs combine and layer to create what the composers call “RaumklangMilieus.” These can then be stretched out three-dimensionally in the respective performance space.
Publication in the context of the book publication “TopoSonic Arts” (excerpt)
Kehrer Publishing House, Heidelberg 2007