Longest Concert
– The Life Of A Playback Device
Longest Concert was premiered in May 2022 in LICHTHOF Theater (Hamburg). With support by Stimme X e.V. Zeitgenössisches Musiktheater Norddeutschland.
Concept
The Role of the Machine
We listen to the concert. We care so much about what to listen to.
But how do we listen? Where do we listen? And, with which device?
Gramophone, vinyl player, transistor radio, walkman, mp3, mobile phone or computer?
Have you thought of how they feel? How would it be, to play music the whole life until got broken or replaced by newer technology?
Every device’s life is a long, long concert. Each of them has a different music style, an acoustic characteristic, advantage, and limit set by their epoch. Do you see, they all have a personality?
The history of playback devices is also the history of electronic music and the modern history of cultural activity. This piece will focus on the individuals in this history, namely, a few pieces of playback devices, and let them be the protagonists of the music theater work to tell the stories in the format change. During the change of technology, countless waste was produced. But can they have another life by telling the younger human some stories? If the offsprings know what would remain after all the updating, would they make a better choice for the planet when they develop the next product?
The Role of the Human
Two human performers will serve as the technical assistants of the devices, they move, operate, modify the devices, but they are anonymous, they don’t have a voice. It is a metaphor for the question “have we become the slave of machines”. Our perception changed by the format: a concert is around 70 minutes because CD can record 69 minutes of music; we want a break after 30 minutes because we used to change the side of a cassette after 30 minutes. But paradoxically, these standards were made by human, either for their personal taste or for marketing success.
Music
Piece 1: on the search for something yet to be lost
–old radio and live-electronics
Over the course of the last 100 years, many technologies for audio listening and preservation have emerged. Many have become obsolete; some still stick around. There’s a constant discussion to shut down FM radio for good and replace it completely with the digital DAB+ alternative. However, that has yet to happen.
The piece explores the sounds of radio stations and the spaces between them to find something of value. It will search for new sounds, old sounds and blur the lines of the immediate and the past. By playing an audio file stored on a computer with a transistor radio, it creates a conversation between times.
With the help of an FM transmitter, sounds will be fed in from an external source on a specific frequency. A microphone can record the radio output, process it, and play it back again. This will create a layer of confusion between what is really live and what is played back.
The performer has multiple ways of manipulating and changing the sound. The main way is with the actual controls of the radio, the frequency wheel, switching between the frequency bands, volume control. But also by changing the length and position of the antenna, changing the position of the radio, or even moving between transmitter and radio. This will open up possibilities for creating a scenic interaction between radio and performer, seemingly melting together into one instrument.
Piece 2: hello girl
– patch Bay and communication devices
Telephony was the decisional fact influencing the technologies of recording and audio transmission. The standards set by the telephone industry shaped the listing habits of several generations.
This piece will play with sounds traditionally or historically transmitted by telephone cables, including private conversation, transferred photocells (used by fax), transferred text (used by pager/FME), and 128kbps music. The typical woman image of a telephone operator (once called “hello girl” in USA) will be the main choreographic element for the performers.
It will make reference to important sound art pieces like Yao Dajun’s telephone wiretap field-recording Documentary of Beijing Sound Group XX1 (北京声音小组档案XX1), Max Neuhaus’s Public Supply, and Hannah Wilke’s Intercourse with…, an art film composed with sound materials from an answering machine.
Piece 3: arty trashy
– vinyl/CD/cassette players and live-Electronics
Tape loop is one of the most popular ways to make and remake music by breaking and rebuilding its physical carrier. Inspired by this practice, we will cut, tape, paint, scratch, glue… different media like vinyl and CD-disks to construct a soundscape with multiple playback devices and the movements of modifying them.
By using vinyl and CD I am referencing the “Cut-Out（打口碟）” phenomenon in the 80s in China: western pop music was banned, but they were allowed to be imported as plastic waste if they were cut. Chinese got their early influence from western pop music within this practice. Besides its significant impact in China, it also shows that art and trash can be transferred to each other in specific historical context.
Piece 4: babel tower
– SuperCollider and choir of playback devices
SuperCollider is an environment and programming language originally released in 1996 by James McCartney for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. Since then it has been evolving into a system used and further developed by both scientists and artists working with sound. It came from and through the history of network music and has most of the typical characteristics of it: different locations connected with the internet, data exchanging, audio results on local machine…
In this piece, a Supercollider concert will be played through different devices. Each device play a different voice or a different combination of the voices and they will be found by the performers from many corners. The performers will pile them up like a tower, while visually the “sculpture” becomes higher and higher, the music will have more and more voices and finally sound like a choir.
This image could stand for the power of communication or the ambition of humans to take control over the world by developing technology. It will be a quasi-religious ritual, questioning the position of today’s music listeners.
Credits
Performance: Dong Zhou und Jan Wegmann
Komposition: Dong Zhou, Jan Wegmann und Martin Kohler
Regie: Yida Guo
Bühnebild: Henriette Weber
Kostüm-Design: XelK-Kollektiv
Dramaturgische Beratung: Sarah-Indiati Hardjowirogo
Klangregie: VictorPiano
Installation: Lukas Kannemann
Reference
Historical Pieces
Milan Knížák: brocken music
https://ubu.com/sound/knizak.html
Max Neuhaus: Public Supply
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/public-supply-i/
Hannah Wilke: Intercourse with…
https://ubu.com/film/wilke_intercourse.html
Articles
Cut-Out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-out_(recording_industry)
Yan Jun: How to be Changed by the World – Chinese Sound Practices in Reality (a-f)
怎樣被世界改變—現實中的中國聲音實踐a-f
https://www.heath.tw/nml-article/how-to-be-changed-by-the-world-chinese-sound-practices-in-reality/
Books
Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media
Williams Duckworth: Virtual Music
Jonathan Sterne: MP3 – the meaning of a format
Dong Zhou 