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Der Pfad zur linken Hand (The left-hand path)
A topographical play in Zurich and Graz, 2011
Text, Music: Marcus Maeder
Interactivity, Music: Jasch

The paths of Zurich (Alter Botanischer Garten) and Graz (Schlossberg, Stadtpark) are now downloadable and fully accessible, please visit www.thelefthandpath.net.

All you need is a smartphone with GPS and compass and your headphones. The app is for iPhones as well as smartphones with Android OS.

A Production of ORF Kunstradio and Musikprotoll im Steirischen Herbst Graz

Supported by Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and sitemapping of the Federal Office of Culture.

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annex marcus maeder
domizil 33, 2010

In architecture, an annex is an extension to a main building. Likewise, the pieces on this mini CD complement and supplement the approaches that Marcus Maeder presented in his latest work titled subsegmental. Here, too, the musical pieces are composed of very short sound segments reproduced at such low speed as to stretch out and form vast soundscapes. Maeder processes and shapes this acoustic topography, giving it a distinctive, surreal quality and populating it with strange beings and events. Those who enter the annex are confronted with highly suggestive soundscapes featuring objects springing out of the inaudible realm of darkness to form a cosmos of micro-events, only to escape perception again, like a ghostly presence brushing past in the dark.

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Past projects:


ubsegmental marcus maeder
domizil 32, 2009

The term and concept of subsegmental is used in psychology and perception within the context of linguistics and phonetics. There, segmental information and cognition refer to the perception of the smallest units of sound in language, i.e. the phonemes; Their equivalent in music are individual tones (or rather the cognitive characteristics of tones), which are perceived within shorter time intervals than those of whole tones. Acoustic information is perceived in a segmentary manner, i.e. through very small or short parts of a sound signal. The equivalent in visual terms would be the individual letters of a text or the individual colours of an image, for example.

Normally, we tend to perceive integral forms (melodies, words or images); subsegmental information is a qualitative characteristic of phonemes: it is important for the quality of the acoustic information but too small or short to be perceived as an individual segment; it is an unconscious, transient factor, quasi the ghost behind and within the acoustic material which constitute and shape the musical information.

subsegmental is a isomorphic approach to this topic, transposing digital recordings down to extremely low speed, concentrating on the micro area of a sample or segment. The original sound is dramatically transformed through pitch change, dithering limitations and appearing artefacts. That in itself is a common phenomenon, but the new material fascinated me: I started working on it with sound design tools to create a soundscape populated by surreal objects. The scenery of most of the pieces is somewhat barren; it is music close to emptiness and nothingness, with long intervals of silence between the sound events.

Mathias S. Oechslin, neuroscientist in the department of Neuropsychology at the Institute of Psychology of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, wrote the album notes, integrating concepts of subsegmental perception and gestalt psychology with the composed material and the basic ideas behind it. He described the gestalts appearing in his imagination while he listened to the individual pieces and expressed the associations that they conjured up in his mind; the release subsegmental has thus become a joint work on perception and imagination by a composer and a scientist. Marcus Maeder

DVD Die Wunschmaschinen out now! Check it here

Soeben erschienen:
domizil + ZHdK Records release event
18. 3. 2009, 20:00
Cabaret Voltaire, Spiegelgasse 1, 8001 Zürich

strøm: shunt (cd)
Thomas Peter: Medir (cd)
Marcus Maeder: Die Wunschmaschinen (5.1 dvd)

13. 11. 2008, 19:00, Hauptbahnhof Zürich
Music for the NOVA Display System by Marcus Maeder
Public Presentation




Music for Dodecahedron

Lasta is a composition made for Mulimedijalni Kamp 2008 in Dubrovnik/Croatia – Lazareti Cultural Factory. The original piece was composed for the Dodecahedron you see here – the loudspeakers form a complete 3D sound sphere/surround situation. The Dodecahedron was been delevoped at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology in Zurich by Fredy Bohner, Martin Neukom, Daniel Bisig and John Flury for the ISO research project. The online version of the piece is converted to a mp3/mp3 surround file ready for download here:

Lasta (mp3) – 4:05/5.6 MB– 2008

The file can be played as normal stereo file (if you haven't a surround setup connected to your computer).

You find Fraunhofer Institute's mp3 surround player here.

More information about mp3/mp3 surround is here.




Surround Play
DIE WUNSCHMASCHINEN (site is here)

Based on Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Cast: Antonin Artaud, Hélène Barat, Ivan Chtcheglov, Guy Débord, Eliza, Sigmund Freud. Music based on Kraftwerk, Velvet Underground, Nick Cave and Richard Wagner.

Performances:

Premiere Saturday, 19. 4. 2008, 8pm
Sunday 20. 4. 2008, 7pm
Kunstraum Walcheturm, Kanonengasse 20, 8004 Zurich, www.walcheturm.ch

Wednesday, 23. 7. 2008, 7pm and 8.30pm
40 Years 1968
Mal Seh’n Kino, Adlerflychtstrasse 6 Hhs, 60318 Frankfurt, www.malsehnkino.de

listen to the trailer (mp3/mp3 surround)


The Desiring-Machines

The desiring-machines, a concept by french philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychiatrist Félix Guattari, embodied in the aftermath of 1968 the unconscious in a world fundamentally affected by technology. An unconscious, which is not seen as a theatre of symbolic representations – criticism belonged to psychoanalysis – but more, politically understood, as a productive factory. The productive, reality-producing desires are desiring-machines; they are our desires in the interaction with the world. The desiring-machines are a critical affair: the market, the media and politics know how to use the desiring-productions; in its delimitation, psychiatry treats them as illness. The machines splutter, overheat, break down, and, again and again, break up into new structures of a schizophrenic, capitalist society, without ever having realised themselves.

One who sets off on his own in order to liberate his desiring-machines is the Schizo. We roam with him through the psychogeography of a city where he encounters others who have, in their social and creative delineation and delimitation, themselves become revolution: eccentrics, schizophrenics, artists and writers – existences on the thin line between passion and pathology.

The play is performed in acousmatic form (a loudspeaker performance) using so-called Ambisonics technology,
a special surround sound system that can create three-dimensional spatial sounds.

Direction, Music: Marcus Maeder. A production of the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology, Zurich University of the Arts, Music Department. Speakers: Sascha Gersak, Pilu Lydlow, Dagmar Gabriel, Edward Piccin, Yves Raeber, Oleg Lips, Helmut Schüschner, Jörg Reichlin. Casting, Locations, Assistant Director: Bettina Disler. Production Manager: Simon Könz. Recording Technology: Silvan Gretener, Tobias Stritt. Programming: Jan Schacher, Philippe Kocher. Ambisonic Technology: Peter Färber. Composition Studio Support: Johannes Schuett.




New release 2007: This ship in trouble.