Topos Concrete (2014)

The territory (gr. topos) is a rough and harsh landscape with mountains, valleys, canyons and plains, sand and stones, though it appears evenly and smooth. The color is grey. The size is about 30 square-meters. It is the floor of a garage and it is made of concrete (engl.) Beton (german).

Concrete is a building material, a kind of unshaped dry powder made of sand, granulated stones and cement, dusty and chaotic. Mixed with water it becomes flexible and fluid and goes into a metamorphosis to become dry again, static and resistable and of any wanted shape.

Aspects of working with native granularity, fluidness as well as stiffness and different kind of acoustic spaces were leading ideas of the composition. To produce the sound of congealed concrete, different objects were moved on the floor (glass, metal, paper, plastics, stone, wood) like a macro-scan-pickup of a turntable. Contact microphones were mounted to the objects in order to record the resonant movements of the objects on the floor.

"Topos Concrete" is based upon the resulting sounds which exhibit rich spectra and numerous individual sound gestures and textures. TOPOS CONCRETE is about the sounding and musical quality of concrete as a substance and the concepts behind it, as it becomes an acoustic building material within the composition by the means of electroacoustic music. The duration of the composition as well as other internal parameters concerning structure and form has been deduced from the ratio of the sides of the room: 1:1.33031.

Topos Concrete is finalist at international composition competition MUSICA NOVA 2014, Prague, czech republic.


Spatialization: 3rd-order-ambisonic.

TOPOS CONCRETE has been premiered at the Linux Audio Conference 2015,
Mainz, Germany and performed at numerous international festival of acousmatic music i.e. International Computer Music Festival 2015, Denton, Texas (USA); NoiseFloor-Festival 2015, Stafford, (UK); New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival 2015, (USA); Akademie der Künste, Berlin (Germany), EMU-Fest International Electroacoustic Music Festival 2015, Rome (Italy); 

Electroacoustic, 8-channel, 09:18

 


Topos Concrete (2014) - excerpt