“Kyoto Bells” (1994) was commissioned for the 1200th anniversary of the city of Kyoto and premiered there in December 1994. Four sampled small bells, further processed with Sound Designer and Turbosynth, provide the material; single impulses condense into a static noise. Spatial movement is part of the composition: the eight channels of the multichannel version form two independent planes of movement with pendulum motions, Doppler effects and rotations. Wilfried Jentzsch, a pupil of Iannis Xenakis and a founding member of DEGEM, has directed the Electronic Studio of the Dresden Musikhochschule, where the piece was realised, since 1993. André Ruschkowski’s “Nasoma” (1996) is based on the sections of his “Salzburgtrum”, a sixty-minute composition of original recordings made in Salzburg, their electronic processing and instrumental sounds; compressed in time and recombined, they were analysed by computer and reassembled with modified properties.
Heinz-Josef Florian’s “Hannah’s Tapesession IIa” (1995) is one of several tapesessions based on recordings of his daughter’s voice. Using Csound and his own software, with resynthesis and voice synthesis by means of the FOF algorithm, the voice is rebuilt from its envelopes; in its original form it is heard only at the very end as a short shout, and the most song-like passages are purely synthetic. Christian Banasik wrote “Begegnung VI” (1996) for Edwin Alexander Buchholz: sampled breath noises and sounds of the accordion are controlled by a computer over four channels during the performance, and Banasik calculated the pitch patterns from abstract formulas with a program of his own.
For “XIX MIKADO 2” (1998), the second part of a radiophonic piece, Johannes S. Sistermanns travelled some 37,000 kilometres on a concert tour to Singapore, Australia and Japan. He never found the one sentence he had meant to speak everywhere; instead he counted and sang numbers and letters in a taxi in Singapore, on the shore of the Indian Ocean and in a plane over northern India, recorded the wooden strokes at the Tenryu-ji temple in Kyoto and dropped Mikado sticks on all kinds of materials along the way. The recording was made by the Saarländischer Rundfunk.
Matthias Kirschke shaped “Masae” (1995) on a Macintosh with Sound Designer II and ProTools III from the sounds of kitchen utensils and paper, which he heavily transformed. Hans Tutschku’s “extrémités lointaines” (1998), commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture and INA/GRM, works with recordings made on a four-week Goethe-Institut concert tour in the summer of 1997 through Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand: the sounds of big cities, music from churches and temples, street music and children’s singing. Its 15 parts describe different places and atmospheres; the CD contains a shortened version.