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DJ
Spooky / to rococo rot / Mick Harris / Klaus Buhlert /
Ernst Horn / John Oswald / Walter Ruttmann
Walter Ruttmann
Weekend Remix
CD |
Weekend by
Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941) is a pioneering work from the early days of
radio. In an 11 minute 10 second collage of words, music fragments and
sounds, the film-maker and media artist Walter Ruttmann presented on 13
June 1930 an avant-garde and radically innovative radio piece: an acoustic
picture of a Berlin weekend urban landscape. After his experience with
his films Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927)
(Berlin – Symphony of a Big City) and Melodie der Welt (1929/1930)
(Melody of the World), Walter Ruttmann deliberately sought possibilities
for producing an audio-film for radio. “Everything audible in the
world becomes material”, he wrote in a manifesto in 1929.
Tones and sounds should exist in their own right. For Weekend they
were recorded as arbitrary and intentional elements on the soundtrack
of an optical sound film using the so-called tri ergon technique. For
the first time an artistic radio production was created whose material
could be assembled and designed according to rhythmic, musical principles.
The technique used also meant that a repeat broadcast would have been
possible. But this never happened. The original of Weekend was
long considered lost. A copy was only rediscovered in New York in 1978.
68 years after the creation of the original, Barbara Schäfer and
Herbert Kapfer invited international artists to make six Walter Ruttmann
Weekend Remix versions for Bayerischer Rundfunk.
The radio play classic, which had opened up new aesthetic perspectives
for the genre at a very early stage, underwent the digital endurance test
and was confronted with the means and possibilities of the digital age
and the remix technique.
The remixes of Klaus
Buhlert and Ernst Horn took Ruttmann's compositional principles of Weekend and circumscribed them with their own compositions. With the new digital
technology new methods of composition were also applied. Pathos and rhythm
were given a contemporary drive, the ironic moments of the disrespectfully
edited original were amplified further with a subsequent treatment by
the composers Horn and Buhlert, new audio spaces were opened up.
In 1998 Berlin, to rococo rot sought acoustic equivalents to the elements
Ruttmann had recorded in 1930. Their version is – in film terms
– a remake, in musical terms a cover version, and at the same time
a homage to Ruttmann and the City of Berlin.
In their Weekend remixes, the British musician Mick Harris and
DJ Spooky from New York staged a return to the fatalistic mood of the
original. The remix compositions focussed on machine noises and the acoustic
signals of disturbed communication. Apart from the added bass and rhythm
tracks, Harris and DJ Spooky used only the original as material, processed
with digital machines. The basis for the remix by the Canadian John Oswald
was the loud noise on the copy of the 1930 original. Oswald's remix conducted
a digital material battle with the original, one which duplicated in Ruttmann's
discontinuous rhythm the copying noises which had developed over time.
Walter Ruttmann: Weekend
"Everything audible in the whole world becomes material. This infinite
material can now be given new meaning by fashioning it in accordance with
the laws of time and space. Not only rhythm and dynamics will be exploited
by this new audio art's will to reshape, but also the space created by
the whole scale of the sound differences arising. This opens the way for
a completely new acoustic art – new in its means and in its effect.“
Ernst Horn: Sympathie
für Schulze Remix
“The more often I listened to it, the more I perceived a naive,
happy, optimistic charm, a playful futurism I could not resist. I did
not make any sudden cuts, like those employed by Ruttman, but in my samples
I merged little scenes with gentle fade-outs.”
DJ Spooky That Subliminal
Kid: Gedanken Form Remix
“Essentially my remix is the encounter between two cultures, both
of which in a state of transition – just like in Germany between
the two World Wars, there is in America a great sense of uncertainty as
the century ends. All seen, of course, through the eyes of a young Afro-American
man..”
Mick Harris: Makeshift
Whitebox Remix
“Weekend – a fantastic sound source. But the piece is so self-contained
that I had no desire to rearrange it. And so I looked for sounds which
allowed me to compose a new piece in as similar a mood as possible.”
Klaus Buhlert: production
memory Remix
“For me this story is very valuable. I want to tell it in Ruttmann's
strains, even with Ruttmann's sounds, I want to open up a few spaces and
reprocess them with my work of the past few years as a homage to Ruttmann,
and for this purpose I have interweaved music and radio play sequences
from my work of the past few years. Out of a monophone Ruttmann take of
the 30s there suddenly emerges a space of the 90s.”
to rococo rot: Berlin
98 Version
”According to the cutting schedule, Weekend was edited very musically,
with different times, for the Friday evening for example, where the whole
Friday work and machine world is edited according to ¼s, 1/16s
and we roughly kept to this, and for today it was more a matter of finding
out and hearing how a weekend works in terms of notes, these were our
guidelines.”
John Oswald: wknd
58 Remix
“There is constant noise on the recording, and that's what I had
to work with. Instead of trying to eliminate it as completely as possible
by technical means, I decided to do the opposite.”
intermedium
rec. 003
ISBN 978-3-939444-04-6
Very few CDs left
20.- €
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