Monster - for big ensemble (2013) / excerpt

9’56''

Introductory note

‘in my maze’ is an independent sound composition based on a walk-in 3D installation that I developed in Second Life in 2024. It was inspired by my many years of work with the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. To me, Second Life is not a game, but rather an artistic medium — a walk-in chat room complete with spatial stereo sound and 3D video. As a composer, builder and performer, I utilise its immersive capabilities in ways that transcend the concepts of commercial metaverses.

Avatars traverse my semi-transparent sound labyrinth, activating location-based sound objects and generating sound sequences that emerge from the situation. Their paths are an expression of their individual freedom to create sound in digital space. As with simultaneous chats, streams and background processes, time becomes fragmented and runs in parallel. Sonic coherence emerges through movement and interaction. 

Transformed swallow calls (natural sound), glockenspiel notes (human musical instrument) and modulated sine tones (digital world) intertwine to form a new tonal topology. Above a fundamental tone of 200 Hz, I construct pure minor thirds (6:5) that do not form octaves, producing audible beats. This is accompanied by my whispered text, 'Ancestralities' – a multilingual, poetic, fragmentary exploration of origin, inherited patterns, and emotional ambivalence towards one's own ancestry. 

By encoding interactive spatial structures as multi-layered sound forms, my maze subverts conventional listening experiences and deliberately sets transgressive impulses in motion. Rather than presenting 'internet music' as an aesthetic of permanent streaming, the composition offers an acoustic cartography of a metaverse in which the perception of time, identity and space can be experienced in sensual, fragmented and ambivalent ways. 

I 'play' my original Second Life installation as though it were an interactive instrument. Its spatial arrangement forms the tonal basis of an original fixed media composition. The labyrinth structure is translated into a rhizomatic network architecture comprising branching paths and an open form with no linear dramaturgy. Like the labyrinth itself, the text fragments reflect inner and genealogical turmoil.

A performance video by the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse documents the audiovisual context of my 3D installation in Second Life (https://youtu.be/4CRTNbabxw4?si=m6OJsFsW7oPFxEeA&t=1255, from 20:08). All the sounds you hear were played in real time by the avatars in Second Life during the performance. This is not a recording or post-production soundtrack.

in my maze (2025)

TEST

Pawel Strzelecki (rec. 1991): C. Debussy: Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum ["Children's Corner" (1908)].

The second movement of the Symphony No. 2 for String Orchestra (2025).

Pawel Strzelecki: 2. Ahead (Scherzo) [Symphony for String Orchestra No. 2 (2025)].

Interminati spazi per violoncello e pianoforte
Matilde Pesenti: violoncello
Mauro  Ravelli: pianoforte
Festival Inarmonico
Roma, Novembre 2025
Museo degli Strumenti Musicali

Interminati Spazi

WAS. SERIES #44 - Diskonnected

Recorded on December 17th 2024, at Theater Pavillon Luzern by Musician's Eye.

PROGRAM NOTES:
"“One of the most unsettling aspects of climate change is the slow and irreversible transformation of the landscape. Mountain ranges once marked by millennia-old glaciers are year by year becoming increasingly bare, while ever more violent floods carve their slopes and plains at their feet, leaving deep traces of devastation. In compensation for the incessant melting of ice, seas and oceans are slowly rising, threatening to engulf everything living on their shores, as evidenced by the ever-higher tide marks that mark the walls of the buildings in Venice, in a kind of slow countdown to the city's extinction.

'Tides Slush Over the Walls' is a work that explores interactions between a bassnicophone, a timpano, and the body of a performer, extending them in space through electronics. The resonance of the timpano, upon which the bassnicophone is placed, along with the performer’s interventions, alters timbre, resonance, and perceived pitch. Meanwhile, the electronic component amplifies these unstable transformations, generating events that invade the listening space like a tide, only to recede and leave behind remnants—sometimes floating, sometimes submerged. 
Form as an immersion in listening, both above, below, and through the surface.” – Maurizio Azzan

Maurizio Azzan - Tides Slush Over The Walls

Nava Hemyari (voice) & Karlheinz Essl (electronics). Part of the album "Karanava" (2025).
Two composers, differing in terms of gender, age, cultural background and instrument, leave their writing desks and venture into the unknown. Despite — or perhaps because of — these differences, they create something genuinely new together: songs composed instantly, without any prior planning, in the moment.
https://www.essl.at/div/karanava.html

Monster - for big ensemble (2013) / excerpt

AlexanderKaiser