remix-X

[rachmiel]

:!:

it's a lot like Boulez's Sonata 2, only with less space.


there are many amusing moments in this, though, which I don't tend to get with big ol pierre ya know.

i hope it is not as clinical/cold as l'oeuvre of m. boulez. ;-) not that i have anything against being icy. but i prefer lurid expressionism. :-)

Hmmmm. I donno. It's the same vocabulary, which is always dry, to me.

interesting. atonal/12-tone music is always 'otherworldly' (for want of a better term) to me, but is very variable in terms of mood. boulez is icy; xenakis is swarm-y (statistical collective); stockhausen is lyrical.

I didn't find 'lurid' here, but 'cartoony', which is usually a good thing.

cartoon-y and lurid are very similar to me. meloDrama. ;-)

I like the swells in the lower mids, the envelopes you arrived at. Which moisten the thing up some. The same-note trills up high do = 'icy', which isn't an objection, just my subjective take.

i can definitely understand about the trills. (repeated notes, actually.) but for me the effect is so overkill at that speed that it moves towards lurid.

I like it a lot, which is something, since its vocab and general style derivation is too "german" by far for my palate.

dude you really need to nurture your inner germanic komponist! ;-) think: dr. faustus (mann).

[rachmiel]

as usual, i was asleep at the wheel when you first posted this so my reply is massively delayed.

we composers are fully aware that time is an (exquisite) illusion. so no worries. :-)

this turned out really nicely. one of the things i like about the original is the way that those tone clusters smack up against conventional piano sounds in the middle range, and the extremely high end plinging.

yes! the passages in the middle range are often breathtakingly lyrical, almost chopin-esque.

getting the full range of possible sounds of a piano is a real challenge, and then setting it in time so each "sound" is like a jewel to consider is harder than i think most would imagine. i suppose it's the classical equivalent of cecil taylor (who i had heard before i had heard stockhausen's non-electronic stuff), in that it's all about timbre on an instrument that has a fairly limited set of timbral possibilities.

never really thought of it this way ... that stockhausen manages to extend the timbral range of the (keyboard) piano. at times it sounds beyond piano.

what i especially like about this remix in particular is the variations in "distance" from the player (echos, reverbs, etc.)--it moves in space alongside the original movements in timbre (except of course you've taken those timbres to an even more mutated place).

glad you are able to hear the constantly shifting delays/echoes/reverb. on the surface it is easy to just hear: conventional delay/reverb. but if you really listen carefully, you can hear that the 'room' that would yield this kind of delay/reverb is beyond the laws of (three-dimensional) physics. ;-)

[herodotus]

It has been so very long since I heard the original, and when I did last hear it, it was on a beaten up library vinyl copy.

So I can't really comment on the remix per se.

But this was quite entertaining. It reminded me less of Nancarrow than of early Zappa, specifically 'The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny'.

[mr.me]

at times it made me think of a ball bearing bouncing across the floor in a mortuary connected to the side of a sanitarium.