Recording Revisited: An evening on the history of experimental electronic music in the region

Künstlerhaus Dortmund
Saturday, November 19, 2022 | 7pm
Concerts, Panel & Releaseparty
with: Scheinleistung, zo-on slows (aka. Echo Ho) and Damian T. Dziwis

MomentsVideo

In collaboration with mex e.V. and artist duo Freya Hattenberger and Peter Simon, the Office medienwerk.nrw invites you to the release of the new research project Revisited: Generators and Generations. Experiments – Music – Electronics in NRW.

With live acts by artists such as Scheinleistung (VA) (hans w. koch & Britta Fehrmann), zo-on slows (aka. Echo Ho) and Damian T. Dziwis, as well as talks by guests such as DJ, sound artist and producer Waltraud Blischke and composer and performer hans w. koch, we will embark on a sonic journey into experimental electronic music from NRW and explore the special history of this artistic field.

With concerts by:
Echo Ho is a sound artist and performer. Her artistic practice goes beyond sound, music and performance by consistently bringing together different media forms, materials and genres at the intersections of art, philosophy, culture and technology.

Damian T. Dziwis is a Düsseldorf-based composer and scientist who creates multimedia works using audiovisual generative algorithms, machine learning and live coding.

Duo Scheinleistung (VA) was founded in 2016 by Britta Fehrmann and hans w. koch with the aim of finding a sonic interpretation of Scheinleistung.

Waltraud Blischke is a lecturer for acoustic research, music and text as well as narration and media aesthetics. She has written for magazines such as Spex, Stadtrevue and Meakusma Magazine, among others. She is also involved in various projects as a DJ and sound artist.

Revisited: Generators and Generations. Experiments – Music – Electronics in NRW

The event will mark the release of the new audio feature from the Revisited series, which twice a year highlights particularly influential events and developments in media art and digital culture in NRW. Revisited: Generators and Generations. Experiments – Music – Electronics in NRW is the third edition of this research, in which listeners can this time immerse themselves in the sonic side of the media arts. Starting with the founding of the WDR studio for electronic music in Cologne, Freya Hattenberger and Peter Simon trace the paths that musicians and artists in the field of experimental music have followed in the region, and let many of the players from then and now have their say. When the Cologne recording studio was founded in 1951, it was the first of its kind in the world and was thus able to attract renowned musicians such as Györgi Ligeti, Henry Pousseuer and Gottfried Michael Koenig to the Rhineland, who artistically explored the technical possibilities on site and created important avant-garde compositions. Much has changed since then. Instead of a studio with cupboard-sized technology that seems almost baroque from today’s point of view, a laptop and handy instruments are often enough today, with which flexible production and online publication can also be done at home.

The questions of how experimental electronic music in the region has developed in the following years up to the present day and to what extent new technologies and production methods have changed artistic processes are the focus of the new episode of Revisited and the evening at the Künstlerhaus Dortmund. The common thread here is the history of technology itself, especially the leaps from analogue to digital tools, recording, playback and distribution media, as well as the resulting sound aesthetics and currently urgent (cultural) political questions about representation and visibility, underground, institutionalisation and recognition.