an impressive piece. complex, mysterious, dramatic & disturbingly beautiful... thanks for sharing!

Good work! I also enjoy reading how it was made, amazing!

Interpolation [flutter]

Für Stephanie...

unburied circle

Flicker

This is actually the first track I recorded by myself since early 4-track recordings decades ago. Recorded at the start of lockdown on an iPad before I discovered Ableton; cleaned up in 2023 for a new airing. Always saw it as a sonic future-scape that is a little rough around the edges but worth sharing again.
Image: AI via Lexica.

El Futuro Es...

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Wagner, this is a touching piece of music whose grand, romantic gesture is (at least for me) nevertheless admittedly outdated in these disillusioned times.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

Used Sonic Pi to live code an improvisation from a rich modular synth sound provided by Steve Meyer (https://soundcloud.com/user-684506476).

Live Code Session (6/24/2023) [from source sound by Steve Meyer]

Part 2 of a fictional live set in an open space... say, a café. I don't have any hardware, just a laptop. if I did, and I could play impromptu gigs, it might sound a bit like this...

oh... and I'll have the eggs benedub, please.

Part 2 [Sunday Brunch Dub]

Anemone

MMXXIIIVIXXVTGHTNNG

Another Dream Sequence

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.

Air 2023 II

Ulrich Müller

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