Tod und Frühling

An Ars Acustica Composition by Werner Cee. Lyrics: Bettina Obrecht. 2023.

If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before. (…) We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth.
Stephen Hawking

If they chase us from earth, my book will be a useful guide to the pilgrims and immigrants to the moon. 
Johannes Kepler 1603

Farewell to Gravity is based on Johannes Kepler’s „science fiction“ text „Somnium“ (1634), a fictitious travel to the moon. A daemon brings the protagonist from Iceland to the moon in order to show him the earth from above (a forbidden perspective in Kepler’s time). He has to deal with adverse conditions and is rewarded a unique look at his home planet. 
The short audio piece transports the space-traveller to today’s moon, still a romantic symbol but currently also eyed as a valuable depot of raw materials and basis for space colonization.
Looking back at earth, the traveller sees her beauty and fragility, but is also confronted with the debris belt surrounding it. While any day now, a „real Kessler effect“ crashing of satellites could build an impenetrable layer around the earth, there is presently a different, equally impenetrable debris belt: fragments of our media culture, crashing and shattering and forever circling the earth. 
The Icelandic astronaut goes through various phases: from the shock of seeing earth as it presents itself today via a short romance to a nostalgic look at old earth and, in the end, defiant acceptance and even relief in view of the burden, the madness he can now leave behind.
The wry sentimental or almost enraptured lyrical texts encounter a dramatic sound aesthetic characterized by virtuoso instrumental playing and driving rhythms; the resulting tension feeds a grotesque dialogue, an outer-space look at our planet jolted by human greed and foolery.

Farewell To Gravity Wav

 DRIFT

Participants: "Kamer" choir, Riga

Director: Maris Sirmais

Realized by Werner Cee



The piece "Cities' Drift" is a composition located in the area where electroacoustic music, hörspiel and choir music meet and interreact.


Some preliminary notes on the creative process:

During concerts of the "Kamer" choir, I made recordings, not restricting my attention to the singing, but also including the noises of the surrounding as well as what happened before and after the concerts. These recordings served as the basic material for the first, "musique concrète"-oriented version of the electroacoustic composition I realized in the studio. While always relating to the basic material, it also features massive transformation. With the resulting musical piece in hands, I returned to the choir asking the singers to interprete the new scenes. I recorded their singing and the noises they created in different spaces and with different miking techniques. These recordings were the basis for the final version: During a second period of work in the electronic studio.

"Drift" deals with transformation, the morphing of original sounds into electronical sounds and vice-versa. The composition is constantly drifting between sound and noise, between an artificial and a natural character; sound surfaces appear irridescent, ever-changing, diffuse. The surfaces dissolve, reappear, are constantly transformed. The human voice as the most immediate communicative tool reflects the complexity of the diverse processes and conditions undergone by a group of persons.


Drift part1

A Field Recording Opera from Sicily. 
Preview of the Radioplay "I Misteri" produced for SWR 2.


Preview  I Misteri Cee

Die Rückkehr der Proserpina

Eine Ars Acustica-Pastorale nach sizilianischen Motiven

Das sizilianische Hinterland ist eine archaische, sonnendurchglühte, ernste Landschaft. Hier befinden sich die Schauplätze von Homers Odyssee und vom Raub der Proserpina, der Tempel der Ceres, die Kulissen allegorischer Gemälde aus der Romantik. Seit tausenden von Jahren ist dieses Land bewohnt und kultiviert, und Spuren der wechselvollen Geschichte sind überall zu finden.

Komponiert ist das Hörstück in Form eines Albums einfacher Klangbilder als moderne Pastorale. Die Geräusche erklingen in größtmöglicher Schlichtheit, daneben stehen panoramaartige Drones, gebaut aus Fieldrecordings und musikalisiert mit der elektroakustischen Ch’in, sowie einfache sizilianische Lieder
gesungen von Umberto Leone und Patrizia Manuguerra

Preview: Proserpina

LA MATTANZA
die rituelle Thunfischjagd auf Favignana
Radiofeature von Werner Cee. SWR 2


Preview La Mattanza

Torrent Of Dreams And Nightmares. Directors Cut

When Weather was Wildlife
by Werner Cee 2020
Certainly, the desire to influence weather patterns is as old as humanity itself. At present, climatologists, poiticians, economists and the military are discussing options to modify the chemical and physical properties of the atmosphere up to the stratosphere on a global scale.
In the age of the Anthropocene, geo-engineering has replaced old-fashioned ritual and religious invocations. Today, in the context of weather manipulation, we are confronted with a jumble of dystopies, concrete plans to save the planet, terror, facts and fake: „whether we like it or not“, as climatologist David Keith puts it, weather has lost its „wildlife“ character.
Compositor/Director: Werner Cee
Production: ARD Südwestrundfunk (SWR) 2020 Commissioning producer and editor: Manfred Hess. Date of first broadcast: February 20, 2020
Duration: 44 min
Cast:
Voices/vocals: Neville Tranter: Cloud Songs by Bettina Obrecht
Freddie Wadling: Jón Steingrímsson (Fires of the Earth)
Adrian McNally: List U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (List of Patents ref. Geo-engineering) Rachel and Becky Unthank: Darkness by Lord Byron
original sound: David Keith, climate scientist
Musicians:
Alf Terje Hana: e-guit
Eivind Aarset: e-guit
Stian Westerhus: e-guit
Peter Hollinger. drums
Werner Cee: bass, e-bass, e-ch’in and electronics

When Weather Was Wildlife_Preview

Werner Cee works in media art, audio visuals, sound installations and electroacoustic music and performs as bass player and live electronic musician. More than 20 Ars-Acustica-Compositions were produced by radio stations such as Studio Akustische Kunst Cologne, DeutschlandRadio Berlin, Hessischer Rundfunk etc. He taught sound art at the High School of Arts Saarbrücken and has been a lecturer for audiovisual art at the Bern University  of Music in 2008/09. Many of his pieces have won international awards, among others at the Ars electronica, Linz 1993// Radio Nacional de España/CDMC Madrid 2000// „Prix Ars Acustica“ Studio akustische Kunst WDR 2002// Computer music competition „Pierre Schaeffer“ Pescara 2002// Computer Space, Sofia/Bulgaria 2002/2004// International Competition of Sonic Art. Bourges 2001/2005// German Sound Art Award 2006 // DigitalArtsWeek Zurich 2007 //Prix Italia 2010 // Prix Italia 2020

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Cee
wernercee.de

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