“Artificial clichés” for four-track tape was created at the ICEM in 1991 with the Synlab analogue synthesiser; it is Bornhöft’s first encounter with electronic composition, in which composer, performer and listener coincide in one person and which he therefore sees as related to the fine arts. Two classes of sound meet: artificial imitations of natural sounds, and sounds that have been worn into clichés through mass reproduction in the commercial music business. The result is a kind of artificial naturalness, with which the piece comments on the tendency to counter an ever more unbearable reality with a second, artificial one. Achim Christian Bornhöft, born in Essen in 1966, studied with Nicolaus A. Huber and Dirk Reith and worked as a DAAD fellow at the CCRMA of Stanford University.
In “Einstimmig …” (1997) the sound of a female voice is “regarded” through the ear: the vibration of the vocal cords, speech sounds and the melody of a scream are extremely stretched or contracted, harmonically condensed or thinned out, until the original function of singing emerges, that of conjuring. Anna Ikramova, born in Moscow in 1966, studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory there and from 1991 to 1996 in Essen with Wolfgang Hufschmidt and Dirk Reith. Marcus Antonius Wesselmann builds “In the mix” (1991) from sequences which in turn consist of figures, and mediates between musical sequences and scenic ones that evoke real events. Montage acts both as a form-giving method (“form”) and as a semantic one (“colour”): figures of musical origin combine into scenic contexts, while speech and concrete sounds are turned into music through rhythmic treatment, cutting and transposition.
In “5 Small Pieces on the small sounds of a small human being.” (1997) Thomas Neuhaus works with the sounds of his son Jakob, who, as he writes, has been in the world for exactly 1168 hours and 51 minutes. The sounds provide both material and form; they are changed beyond recognition and yet do not deny their origin. Neuhaus teaches at the ICEM and is one of the developers of the AUDIAC project for computer-assisted composition and sound synthesis.
In “Orpheus und Demokrit – a piano music with tape” (1997) Kilian Schwoon starts from Democritus’ theory of atoms: long since disproved, it lives on in computer thinking, which breaks everything down into noughts and ones. The tape part consists of “manipulated reproductions” of piano events, from the normal touch to pedal noises; through extreme stretching, the “atoms” of the analysis become audible, above all at the beginning and the end. Schwoon thus draws attention away from the attack to the vibration of the body of the piano, from which great arcs and perhaps a kind of song emerge. The piano part is played by Martin von der Heydt; sound direction and production were in the hands of the composer.