for recordings of satellites, string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou April 18th 2021
Quatuor Diotima

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Achille Judica-Cordiglia and his brother Giovanni Battista are well-known amateur radio operators who claimed in the late fifties and early sixties to have heard radio communications taken from secret Soviet Union space missions, including SOS signals, telemetry, and the dying sounds (heartbeats and breathing) of a suffocating "lost cosmonaut.” Even though their claims have been thoroughly debunked, the stories of these sensational intercepts are part of the mythology of the Space Age and stand at the origin of a durable conspiracy theory.
In the 1960s, the idea of a “lost cosmonaut” spoke to acute fears. Despite the optimism of space exploration tales, the reality of space travel—from sending a dog into orbit to putting a man on the moon—had a striking effect on the public and raised more life-altering questions than it provided answers. A cosmonaut lost in space served as a poignant metaphor for individuals’ anxieties about the future in an era of nuclear tension and uncertainty. This helps to explain the diffusion and the longevity of a hoax that identified the stain of some kind of original sin on the shiny surface of the triumphs of the early space age. Now that the cosmos has switched in our imaginations from being the route toward a radiant future for humanity to a place of accumulation for space capitalism or a post-doomsday shelter for the extremely rich, these stories of dead astronauts are more sinister and haunting than ever.

The title "Memories of the Space Age" is borrowed from the collection of stories of the same name by J.G. Ballard (1988), a set of writings thematically linked around rotting launch gantries at Cape Canaveral, the failure of the US space program, dead astronauts eternally orbiting in space, deserted hotels lining the Florida coast, and the lonely, disturbed individuals who linger at the fringes of this lost dream of the Space Age.

The piece uses more than 100 historical radio recordings of human-made objects gravitating in Low Earth Orbit, for example, the beacon beeps of satellites, telemetries, and the voices of cosmonauts, along with the ill-famed Judica-Cordiglia tapes. This material—shifted and transposed to match the harmonic structure of the piece—is the starting point for an imitation game that involves the string quartet and that grows into a complex three-layered polyphony.

In addition to these archival materials, the electronic material features digital processing of the string instruments with the modulation techniques that were, and still are, commonly used for radio and television transmission. The fragile, inharmonic sonorities of the prepared strings are mirrored by electronic phenomena like feedbacks or physically-modeled chaotic circuits that behave in similarly erratic ways, in a laborious attempt to tame the untamable while at the same time pursuing serendipitous glitches.

"Memories of the Space Age" deals with the aesthetics of ground noise, white noise, and lost radio waves, with the misuse and malfunctions of technology, and with the misinterpretation of a chaotic signal as pareidolia. It is also, somehow, a nostalgic homage to obsolete or soon-to-be-obsolete technologies and to the visions of the future these technologies carried. That future now seems irretrievably lost, but its ghost, like Ballard’s dead astronauts, still haunts us.

Mauro Lanza - "Memories of the Space Age" (2020)

Orbit For Large Chamber Ensemble (MIDI sound)

With Furrer 70, Klangforum Wien is creating a legacy in the artist’s lifetime: Beat Furrer – composer, conductor and founder of the ensemble – has selected 18 key works from his oeuvre, collaborating with Klangforum Wien and conducting the ensemble for a series of seminal new recordings, setting a timeless standard for the interpretation of his compositions. The collection includes 3 videos, 2 books with new essays, and Furrer's personal reflections on literary works close to his heart. Furrer 70 offers unparalleled access to his music and artistry on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Released as an exclusive and limited-edition media box set for collectors and available to explore freely on furrer70.klangforum.at

Konzert für Violine III

Performed by Josuè W Amador, Richard Barrett, Tomer Baruch, Amir Bolzman, Robin Eggers, Maia Francisco, Dan Gibson, Dirar Kalash, Giacomo Lepri, Sohrab Motabar, Marko Uzunovski, Saskia Venegas, Juan Andrés Verdaguer, Semay Wu, Kacper Ziemianin

SEE 2 February 2015 Stockhausen - Übereinstimmung

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Roqué Rivas - Mutations Of Matters

Tenebrae, extrait 1

for string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou June 7th 2017
Quatuor Diotima

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As a kid we had a television set with an antenna that rotated (you could rotate it from inside of your house). When the major channels would go off-air you could rotate it and pick up strange other channels from smaller cities around - from across the border, Buffalo and so on - and you would see strange things, that were kind of hard to see (there was a lot of static) and it was very intriguing to watch that kind of things. That was really the core, the crystal at the centre of this movie: my experience with that thinking “what if the images that you pulled up were really quite extreme, disturbing, possibly illegal, and what would you think then, would you keep seeking out those channels or would you call the police or what would you do, how would you respond to them?”

David Cronenberg on his movie Videodrome (commentary track of the Criterion Collection BlueRay)

The Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion was a television signal hijacking (probably the most famous and certainly the longest signal hijacking ever) that occurred in Chicago, Illinois, United States on the evening of November 22, 1987. The signal pirates, whose identities were never found, succeeded in getting their broadcast intruded onto WTTW (a local Public Broadcasting Service television station).
The pirate broadcast, which lasted 90 endless seconds, featured an individual disguised as Max Headroom (a sci-fi computer-generated television character quite popular in the 80s, coming from dystopian near-future dominated by television and large corporations).
Around 11:15 p.m. an episode of the British TV-Series Doctor Who was suddenly interrupted by television static, after which an unidentified man wearing a Max Headroom mask and sunglasses appeared. The man started to moan, scream and laugh, uttering various random phrases (the audio was distorted and crackling), including New Coke's advertising slogan "Catch the Wave" while holding a Pepsi can (Max Headroom was a Coca-Cola spokesperson at the time). He then tossed the can out of sight, presented his middle finger wearing a rubber extension, sang an excerpt of “I’m losing you” (a 1966 Motown hit recorded by the Temptations), hummed the theme song of Clutch Cargo (a clumsily-animated television series of the 60s), moaned painfully complaining about his piles, farted, put on and off a giant glove (similar to the one worn by Michael Jackson at the time). He then partially exposed his buttocks, howling: "They're coming to get me!”, while an unidentified female accomplice wearing a French maid outfit started to spank him with a flyswatter. The transmission then blacked out for a few seconds before resuming the Doctor Who episode in progress.

“The 1987 Max Headroom Broadcast Incident” features a string quartet “enhanced” with transducers and preparations. 
The digital processing of the instruments is largely inspired by the same modulation techniques that were - and still are - commonly used for radio and television transmission. 
The piece, an hommage to obsolete or soon-to-be deprecated technologies and to the media-dominated, dark future that the “cyberpunk” sci-fi of 80s foretold, is dedicated to the memory of Fausto Romitelli.

Mauro Lanza - "The 1987 Max Headroom broadcast incident" (2017)

Klangforum Wien
Emilio Pomàrico

see also the video of the premiere at Festival Trattorie (Parma, Italy) with Bas Wiegers conductiong the Klangforum Vienna:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqS2cbYTBg8

schraffur (2017)for quartertone-accordion & ensemble (excerpt)

Voice: Siân Wassermann. Photo credit: Suren Manvelyan.

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KIMSUJANG