Morpheme excerpt [Electric Indigo & Thomas Wagensommerer] from Electric Indigo on Vimeo.
Journey into “Morpheme,” a half-hour audiovisual odyssey by Electric Indigo (aka Susanne Kirchmayr) and visualist Thomas Wagensommerer. An exercise in granular extremism, it begins as a delicately crackling mist of noise, as if atoms were dancing. Just about five and a half minutes into this excerpt, someone switches on a light, and it buzzes with pounding, angrily-vibrating rhythms.
Electric Indigo’s music is a regular feature here because I never cease to be amazed at the breadth of her musical output, ranging from darkly-grooving club-ready material to more idiosyncratic experimental voyages, over a 20-plus-year career. On top of that, her female:pressure project continues to spotlight deserving and under-appreciated women in electronic music. (For more of what you can dance to, if you need to move around a bit at the moment, read on.)
“Morpheme” with Wagensommerer is a literal, imaginative microcosm.
The visuals are evocative in the excerpt, but you can get still more of the range of sounds in a slightly longer SoundCloud excerpt, which opens up into slowly-modulating, pitched digital colors.
Susanne expands on the description of the project.
All sounds are derived from a sentence Sadie Plant said: “To let noise into the system is a kind of fine art in both cybernetic terms and in terms of making music, too.” It was recorded at the ctm panel “sound, gender, technology” this year, which was organized by Annie Goh.
The video is derived from a transcription of the sentence, too. Each character has a 3d representation, and these representations are equally deconstructed and re-assembled. We both use various FFT applications to achieve this. I mostly worked with Robert [henke]’s granulator II [Max patch – that’s free for Ableton Live / Max for Live].
The resulting auditive and visual structures correlate. When performed live, Thomas receives an audio signal of my sum.
I am going to develop a surround version of it. The stereo, pure audio version of Morpheme was premiered at Heroines of Sound Festival at Berghain Kantine in june 2014.
If we are lucky, we could present it as multichannel audio and surround HD video one day.
There you go – any presenters who want to help make some of that “luck,” ahem, here we are!
We’ll share the results of the panel, incidentally, next week – I’ve got a story on that and full audio, to share as CDM heads to Amsterdam Dance Event.
I love instruments that can prove wildly different results. For contrast, see Granulator II in the hands of Robert Henke — equally beautiful, but very different both sonically and compositionally. And that to me is the mark of a great tool, that ability to be surprised.
For her part, Electric Indigo can make you move around as well as scratch your chin. Having played the intimate Kantine next door in June, she’s playing Sunday evening at Berghain. (Pay no mind to Berghain’s “Innervisions” title – quite a lot of other labels represented in this 24+-hour span, and Indigo flying her female:pressure banner.)
And it’s nice to see artists bold enough to take one name for experimental and club projects alike. With that in mind, here’s a new podcast for Detroit’s Just Dreams, one that nicely inter-weaves techno and … well, delicious oddness. Also some music from Paula Temple, whom I look forward to catching up with next week at ADE.
Full specs, links, and track listing:
twitter.com/justdreamsmusic
facebook.com/justdreamsmusic
justdreamsmusic.tumblr.comMore dreams. Good music.
Episode 011 – Electric Indigo
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www.youtube.com/user/electricindigo[TRACKLISTING]
01. Irradiation – Entropy [Temp~ 017d]
02. Electric Indigo – Morphem SN [unreleased]
03. Antonio Ruscito – Ionosfera [Resiliens 011]
04. Sejon – Dark Tunnel / Aleja Sanchez Remix [Etichetta Nera 031]
05. Bruno Sacco – Hallucinegenics [Gravite 005]
06. Electric Indigo – Cinq [Suicide Circus Dark Series 007]
07. Synus0006 – Weird [B4CK6ROUNDNO1SE Y01]
08. Mike Parker – Flying Nerves [REPITCH 04]
09. Orphx – Drowning For You [Sonic Groove D1466]
10. Aerts – Fracture / Developer Remix [Authentic Pew 010]
11. The Plant Worker – 1 [LIMITED.G 005]
12. Electric Indigo – Zero [Suicide Circus Dark Series 007]
13. Mental Resonance – 31.0 / Angel Costa Remix [Serial Number 849 031]
14. VSK – Resistance [Genesa 005]
15. Terrence Fixmer – Elka [Deeply Rooted 047]
16. Svaag – Sade [Semantica 66]
16. Yaleesa Hall – Second Leyland [Will & Ink 004]
17. Paula Temple – Monstro [R&S 1412]
18. Scalameriya – Kneel! [Newrhythmic 015 Ltd]
19. Val_Ex – Metacognition [Solar One Music 030]
20. Orphx – Tangled Paths [Sonic Groove D1466]
21. Allen – EM26 [M_Rec Ltd 22]
22. SNTS – N4 [SNTS 05]
23. Val_Ex – Atom [Solar One Music 030]
I need words other than dark. Bleak? Unsettling? Evil? Wrong in a good way? Something. It’s Friday. Dancing about architecture and whatnot. Just listen.