“Ils voudraient avoir un corps” – Saskia Reither opens her foreword with this line by Paul Eluard. All three pieces start from a basic material, synthetically generated sound points, sound complexes or an existing composition, to which reverberation and distribution over several loudspeakers lend an impression of space. Nearness and distance are bound up with temporal structures: short particles string together into sustained sounds, complex sounds break down into single points, stretched time becomes audible as spatial expansion. Dirk Reith, artistic director of the ICEM (Institute for Computer Music and Electronic Media) at the Folkwang-Hochschule, is also the founder of the International Festival for Computer Music and Media Art EX MACHINA in Essen.
Gerald Eckert composed “Aux mains de l’espace” for four-track tape in 1992/93 on the ICEM’s Synlab analogue synthesiser. The rhythmically irregular sound points were produced by extreme overdriving of filters; their distribution over the loudspeakers and reverberation give them geometric movements of their own in space. A further process consists solely of reverberation, the original signals having been cut away. After a general pause of ten seconds comes a final sequence made from deeply transposed material hardly used before. The peculiarities of the Synlab, such as its thermal instability, also became part of the compositional process. Eckert chose Eluard’s poem “Les Tours du Silence” only after the piece was finished, as an associative rather than programmatic reference.
“nahe zu fern” was written for eight loudspeakers and now also exists in a version for two. Electronically generated, non-sampled instrumental sounds are distributed over four channels on the tape and treated with artificial reverberation in such a way that the listener perceives “pulsating” spaces whose volume constantly changes. The field of tension between nearness and distance, between presence and blurring, becomes a general compositional principle. Dirk Reith, born in 1947, studied with Milko Kelemen in Düsseldorf and with Gottfried Michael Koenig in Utrecht, and from the early 1970s built up the Electronic Studio of the Folkwang-Hochschule.
The model for “La cloche sans vallées” is the cantus firmus technique, in which a Gregorian melody underlies a new composition. All the sounds derive from a single sample, “La vallée des cloches” from Ravel’s cycle “Miroirs”, which is broken down into sound particles as short as 0.002 seconds. Ritardando and accelerando determine the form: the first 560 seconds are heard in seven stages, each accelerated and shortened, until they shrink to a short bang; from it a new structure expands and ends in a quotation from Ravel, accompanied by itself transposed by a fourth. Ludger Brümmer, a DAAD fellow at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) of Stanford University from 1991 to 1993, realised the piece there in 1993 with Common Lisp Music and Common Music.