Studioforum
April / Mai 2012
Icarus
Ein Beitrag von Andi Otto zur englischen Gruppe 'Icarus"
die am 6.2.2012 einen Online-Release aus 1000
unterschiedlichen Versionen eines Tracks veröffentlicht
haben. Jede dieser Versionen kann jeweils nur einmal
heruntergeladen werden. Andi Otto reflektiert diese interessante
Verschiebung im Medialen der Form, wenn nicht mehr ein Track
identisch vervielfältigt, sondern in immer neuer Form in
seinen möglichen Erscheinungsweisen Gegenstand der
Distribution wird.
Hier ändert sich ein historisch
unhinterfragtes Setting in einem neuen medialen Umfeld in
dramatischer Weise, was natürlich auch Auswirkungen auf die
Ästhetik und Form der Musik selbst hat. In dem
einstündigen Beitrag sind verschiedene Tracks der Icarus
Releases zu hören.
Der Beitrag steht für DEGEM Mitglieder auch
als Podcast im internen Bereich dder DEGEM Homepage unter
Otto_Icarus_Feature_2_12.mp3 zum download bereit.
Weitere Infos:
In 2011, the UK electronic group Icarus (Ollie Bown
and Sam Britton) set out to return to studio production for the
first time since their celebrated 2005 album I Tweet
the Birdy Electric. In the interim the duo's collaborative
electronic music productions had focused increasingly on the
possibilities of improvised electronic music performance,
perfected through custom performance tools and documented in
albums that were either live or edited reinterpretations of
live improvisations.
Since 2005, though, the world of making and selling
records had changed so dramatically that Icarus did not feel at
ease with the singularity of a traditional studio
production. Generativity has been a strong theme in Icarus'
composition. In thinking of ideas for a new album, the question
arose as to why, with so much ongoing experimental
generative practice in both music and art, doesn't generative
composition have a foothold in everyday music listening
experiences?
That such works often run as software is one
factor. This automatically introduces a level of obscurantism
and is not in keeping with the relative universality of
fixed media data files that dominate listener's music
collections. Besides that, the consistency of an album, and it's
longevity both as an artistic statement and as an anchor
for memories and associations is a desirable property in the
hands of its owner, even if not in the mind of its
maker; we adapt to the repeated listening of a complex
passage with heightened intensity more than with the waning of
interest through familiarity. Except for the small niche of
people fascinated by it, generative music wouldn't appear to be
on anyone's wish-list.
Reflecting on these ideas, Icarus settled on
devising not a generative album but a parametric one, one in
which the album was a fixed and finite entity, a decisive
compositional work, but drawn out over 1,000 smoothly varying
versions of the same body of musical content, a unique copy for
anyone wishing to posses one, of which they can claim an
exclusive ownership unfamiliar to the musical data strewn across
iTunes and Spotify, but still thoroughly compatible with
these worlds.
After some months juggling software hacking and
studio composition in continuous alternation, the result of this
compositional experiment, FFD has been rendered
in its entirety as 8,000 tracks — 1,000 variations on an 8-track
album — ready to be released at the beginning of 2012 via a
custom store that destroys each version as it is sold,
handing a share of the rights (and responsibilities) of the
recorded work to its buyer.
The music of FFD naturally reflects the
process that created it, which is itself a natural progression
of Icarus' style, weaving chaos and chance into an awkward
narrative of stuttering, stopping-starting spontaneity that all
the while resembles 'real' music in its coherence and its
engagement of the listener, who may perceive either that
something has gone wrong in the strangest of ways, or that a
door has been opened into an unfamiliar alternative future.