Projektionen – technology and sensation (2011-2013)
Martin Riches' music machines are based on 18th century automaton technology and controlled by modern computer technology. This contradiction is one of the foundations of the composition of seemingly incompatible things.
The visual aesthetics of the machines result solely from their visible function, nothing is added to embellish them - a somewhat different kind of technology from that of our consumer world.
These objects are usually seen and heard in art exhibitions.
for Talking Machine, StringThing, 24 Piece Percussion Installation,Voice, Alto Flute, Percussion, Ensemble and Live Electronics
Projections shows transmissions of different kinds and to different extents.
The music machines are embedded in a landscape of different colours and dependencies.
Technology creates sensations in different environments.
Language is changed by a speaking machine. The machine speech, in turn, is imitated by musical instruments by adopting the speech rhythms and subtle tone intervals of the machine.
A frequent principle of the compositional method of projections is the enlargement of an object through its projection, which, depending on the strength, results in increasing changes, in extreme cases distortions of the object.
Thus, the vibration behaviour of gong and tam-tam is projected onto a string sound machine and onto the room-filling 24 Percussion Pieces.
The spectral channels of gong and tam-tam sounds and the sound of a simple sheet of metal are transferred to an instrumental ensemble and form its microtonal scales.
The voice is frequency-manipulated.
The gong is modulated with tam-tam spectra, the tam-tam with gong spectra.
Temporary electroacoustic amplification of instruments and machines serves as projection.
Oversized reverberation of the ensemble sound acts as a projection into the space.
The solo flute concentrates its playing on linguistically-structurally oriented parts as a conversation partner of the Talking Machine. It dominantly controls the machine through its sound, but at times becomes a machine itself. The Talking Machine takes on human traits such as vulnerability, failure, but also dominance in metrical passages - projections.
The sound-oriented moments are represented by the three sound sources gong, tam-tam and sound sheet. Supported by the solo voice, they form a sound world that is juxtaposed with the mechanical sound machines with echoes of Asian cultures, from whose circle the sound sources gong and tam-tam originate.
They become structural where their sound sets the ensemble and the machines in motion or stops them.
By projecting concrete objects (machines, sound sources, clichéd musical movements such as intensification, pathos, drama, melancholy, emptiness) into other contexts or environments, abstractions and blurring are created. This has an effect right down to small structures and their correspondence.
The acoustic language structures and the spectral way of composing prevent a musical language. The composing oscillates between this compositional practice and sensation-driven free setting.
Fading out, fading away:
Dissolve
Crumbling...
Speech images, word sounds
Pretences
Mediated, unmediated
into nothingness -
Irony
