echoes of '68

Who

IEMA Ensemble 2017/18

When and where

12.04.2018 Deutschlandfunk, Cologne, Germany

Program

Walk - Michael Parsons

Concerte for Bassoon and Firealarmsystem - Carson Kievmann

10 Ma?rsche - Mauricio Kagel

STYX - Anestis Logothetis

Anaktoria - Iannis Xenakis

Workers Union - Louis Andriessen

Sechs Bagatellen - N.A. Huber

white echoes - Saskia Bladt

Setup

The concert took place in the main broadcasting hall from the DLF in Cologne as part as the Forum Neue Musik festival. Because the amount of concerts that take place in very short time, the organizers decided to block the stage for the performance on the next day, so the ensemble was placed in the middle of the hall and in front of the main PA. The audience was sitting then in a U shape around the musicians. This presented a big challence, as then the main PA couldn't be use to amplify any of the instruments.

The composer also wanted to have an echo chamber effect on some of the instruments and a live video stream from Vienna with a screen sharing system, where the artist Anna-Sophie Lugmeier could write and react to the music performance in real time.

Sound Design

For Saskia Bladt's "white echoes" I worked intensively with her, the director Daniel Pfluger and the artist Anna-Sophie Lugmeier while developing the piece.

All the instruments had close-up microphones for the recording, so we took advantage of that and routed them to the mixing desk for the live-electronics and in case some amplification was needed. Because of the positioning of the musicians the main PA could only be used for playbacks, so some alternative had to be found. The main challenge was to integrate the acoustic sound with the playbacks and the keyboard, and generating the echo chamber effect with two different systems.

Realisation

For the echo chamber I proposed to use a real room instead of a reverb effect. We then routed a bus from the mixer to a speaker inside one changing room in the DLF and put a microphone there to get the sound from the room. At the end of the piece the trumpet player also played inside of the room to generate a distant sounding effect. The result was played back thru the E8 speakers that were hanging in front of the audience.

All the Keyboard and playback sounds were played thru the main PA behind the musicians.