About Variations is a reflection on a version of John Cage's Variations II that I created in 2014. I reorganized and sonically overpainted the musical material that was created then, resulting in numerous drones that now largely determine the shape of the new piece which I created in 2020.
The artwork has been made by Thomas Müller. See also www.flickr.com/photos/txmx-2/albums

About Variations

Windos 1≠1
The piece is based on a simple harmonic modulation whose chords are stretched over the entire length of the piece. The individual chord tones, however, are not even but broken up into manifold glissando movements and meet only at a few points. The result is a constant oscillation between harmony and disharmony. So a layer of constant of sound was created that runs silently in the background, so to speak, and only becomes audible in a few places. Like when you open and close windows and let sounds in for moments. I froze some of these moments (with the IRCAM verb), which also leads to these magical noisy sounds that might remind you of orchestral sounds. Some of these sounds are doubled and then processed differently, so that they take different developments from an identical starting point: 1≠1. The sound material is entirely made of sawtooth waves that have been heavily processed.
The artwork has been made by Thomas Müller. See also www.flickr.com/photos/txmx-2/albums

Windwos 1≠1

“Purgatory Song” is based on a voice improvisation, which I recorded years ago for a collaboration with South African musician and visual artist Garth Erasmus, but never used. Later I added some sounds of a prepared piano, as an ironically broken allusion to the romantic “Kunstlied”. Much later I processed these elements together with electronic sounds to create the Purgatory Song.
The artwork has been made by Thomas Müller. See also www.flickr.com/photos/txmx-2/albums

Purgatory Song

“SchPCTR” is an acronym of „Schönberg“ and „spectrality“. It is based on one of my favorite pieces by Arnold Schönberg, the "Begleitmusik für eine Lichtspielszene" from 1929. It was a music for a film that never existed, thus an imaginary media piece. In the last third of the piece, the harmonium plays a series of sustained chords. I stretched these chords extremely and permuted them using the twelve-tone scale of the piece. In the course of the piece, the higher spectral components of the sounds increase continuously, thus becoming increasingly noisy at the end. The twelve-tone series was also the basis for the melodic elements that developed from the preceding figurations. Finally, the whole construct was once again "painted over" improvisationally.
The artwork has been made by Thomas Müller. See also www.flickr.com/photos/txmx-2/albums

SchPCTR

Alekto is the name of one of the three Erynnias, the Greek goddesses of vengeance. Alekto, is the ceaseless one who never rests in her pursuit of criminals, especially murderers, even if it means starting a war. When the Jacobins exercised their bloody reign of terror after the French Revolution, the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, who was initially an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, criticised this in a poem with the words: "Alekto, Unlawful is her terrible name / Now becomes at home with you / Hissing about with the snakes / Shaking the torch of death / In the twilight I see a bloody robe". 

Alekto is at home in many homes now. This is also what this piece refers to. I generated almost all the percussion sounds in this piece from sounds of the domestic household. The clatter of knives in a cutlery box, from pot lids, hammering, and so on. Additionally there are sounds of shattering glass. All these sounds were highly processed and transformed. All other sounds in the piece were programmed by me with software and hardware synthesizers, whereby physical modelling played an important role. I used mostly granular synthesis in the subsequent transformation of the sounds. The piece is based on a twelve-tone row, which I constructed in such a way that consonances and dissonances are in a tense state of suspension. 

The almost conciliatory ending of the piece refers to a transformation in the character of Alekto. It was the the Greek poet Aeschylus who transformed the Erynnies into the Eumenides, who now became tutelary goddesses.

The artwork has been made by Thomas Müller. See also www.flickr.com/photos/txmx-2/albums

Alekto

Function X emerged from a call for musique concrète compositions that would deal with Jean-Luc Godard. In this piece I referred essentially to an interview with Godard in which he mentions the word Function X, as well as to a few background sounds from his films, which were subjected to a series of sonic transformation processes.

The artwork has been made by Thomas Müller. See also www.flickr.com/photos/txmx-2/albums

FUNCTION X

Escapology is a neologism of Eschatology, Escape and Apology. Open to any interpretation, the piece is based on an improvisation with various synthesizers and noise generators and was brought into its final form in a long process of editing and processing in the computer.

The artwork has been made by Thomas Müller. See also www.flickr.com/photos/txmx-2/albums

Escapology

Air 2023 II

This piece is created from a variety of experiments with speech sounds. The piece refers to a beautiful, melancholic poem by Jorge Luis Borges entitled Descartes. But this is not a setting in the classical sense. Instead, I took a few lines of the English translation of this poem and put together the words as best I could from phonemes taken from language teaching videos of over 50 languages - spoken by women and men - letter by letter. This was the basic material and all the sounds of this piece are developed from it without exception. Of the poem itself, no words or fragments of words appear in the piece that might be intelligible. Everything is pure sound. The harmonic-melodic material of the piece is derived from the Liebestod of Wagner´s opera Tristan und Isolde. Although I am not a great fan of Richard Wagner, this is a touching piece of music whose grand, romantic gesture is (at least for me) nevertheless admittedly outdated in these disillusioned times. So it is a reminiscence that also plays with the idea of the multilingual recitation of Borge´s poem by women and men - maybe a strange love story across language barriers. The harmonic sequence of Wagner´s piece was mirrored on a twelve-tone row and the resulting material was then subjected to various other serial processes and microtonal pitch changes according to the pitches of the phonemes. In a few places, however, the original music has remained recognizable, appearing for moments like a shadow.

For the sonic transformations, I worked with spectral software, such as Steinberg's Spectral Layers and TS2 from Ircam labs. Later, granular software came into play, such as U&I's MetaSynth and accSone's Crusher X. I also converted individual phonemes and whole words into wavetables for further processing using the Waldorf Iridium.

Air 2023 II

Born in 1957, I was initially a rock guitar player, before I changed my musical way and approached experimental electronic music. Two people have had a decisive influence on my musical path: My teacher, mentor and fatherly friend Josef Anton Riedl (composer and former artistic director of the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music) and the New York based composer, electronic musician and trombone player George Lewis, whom I owe my approach to improvised music. Besides my free musical works, I compose and produce music for theatre and ballet. In 1998 I co-founded the musicians collective 48nord. I have also worked as an author for the music department of Bayerischer Rundfunk, have been guest artist at the Center for Art- and Media- Technology (ZKM), curator of a sound art gallery (t-u-b-e, Munich), and have received a number of awards and grants for my work. Today I work in my own small electronic studio in Starnberg - close to (but far enough away) from the Bavarian capital Munich.

Ulrich Müller

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