tape music on 15 tracks, 1981/82
new digital synchronization from intermediate material 2004

In 1980 the old castle, I was living in for some years, was about to be sold and I had to look for another place. I rented an empty pub in the countryside and set up my studio in the formar dancing room. In the years before I made lots of outdoor-recordings in the ambient of a small village close to a place for military exercises: people, animals, harvest machines, church-bells, brass-bands, sirenes, tanks, jets, guns, everything. Now the time had come, to digest this plenty of material by a new composition. I organized it around a central recording of breathing and put in opposite some other sounds of the human body . (For this purpose I used a measuring microphone, which could record your heartbeat even from one meter distance). Georg Danczul had constructed some analog devices of high quality according to my needs (generators, modulators, distorters) and so I started to work on ATEM.

At first I made a rhythmical analysis of the breathing by means of extreme distortion. The structure, I got in this way, is responsible for the whole form, as well as for all transformations. According to this structure there are 8 sections. Every section holds an outdoor-recording in its center, surrounded by its derivatives and transformations of the breathing and body-sounds.

ATEM is actually a fragment. Its whole form follows the projection of the breath-in into 20 minutes, while all details mirror the facettes of breath-in and breath-out as well. (Originally I intended to compose a longer second part, but the development of my style and knowledge during this work led me somewhere else).

The appearance of this piece is very much dominated by speedups. Composers, dealing with recorded material, usually like to use slowdowns, because sounds become more mighty and the virtuel rooms bigger and more impressive. In ATEM I discovered the opposite. By such speedups in combination with graduated distortion, I got those fine, nervous, spacelsess patterns, which are maybe typical for all my works of this period - naked sound, leaving space beeing a matter of room.
G.R.

ATEM.mp3  2,7MB