deutsch I english Waves and Grains Tim Zulauf Grains and waves are phenomena of scale.  Because waves carry grains and grains carry waves, it just depends.  When viewed from a distance (on a tourism scale), it is the surging and frothing of the waves that take precedence in the sea.  And although we would willingly say that the surging and lathering of the waves are an aggregate, a sum total or a power of the countless micro-motions of water, wind and sand – we always sense an atomic crunching that makes the waves, the large fluctuations, appear as infinite fragments of illusion.   It is a crunching that will never accept our version of coherence, a crunching that whispers: there aren’t any waves.  There is only one scale on which waves are marked.  Only we hear also a second whisper, the whisper of the wave: there aren’t any grains.  Your grains are my sway. parallax tells of the rebellious mix of grains and waves, sings about it, produces it.  In his eight-part structured arrangement, Bernd Schurer’s composition exposes eight facets that all generate an undeceiving enmeshed soundscape: just as grains and waves entwine one another, so, too, do the musical interpretation and the soundscape in parallax. Bernd Schurer fans out the visible listening experience to an aural visual one on intermediate stages that glide back and forth. They constantly displace one another, cast folds and pull the quarrelling opposition with their anti-Western feeling onto thin ice. What happens, then, to the confronted scale once it starts to move itself, once it stirs the air, creates sound waves, causes butterflies to totter or cities to sink?  When we listen to parallax, we hear how algorithmic wave sounds approach, how their rippling smoothness crumbles to microrhythms – sequential microrhythms that in turn hold beating particles then melodic phrases of tremendous range; saw mills that cut down forests.  Yapping voices resound through the rooms, singsong and counting verse are heard, bomb storms start to howl then level off to ever flatter lines of a medical oscillograph.  Cardiac arrest, no more pulse. The segmented self-dynamising sound world cuts through our emotions and the conventions underlying them.  It provokes our emotional attachment to convention and provokes the conventions of our emotionality.  Provoking: she entices them both out of their dwelling, reveals them as a pair.  And then you see how emotionality and conventionality stand there, hand-in-hand, in the sound clouds and the hail sounds and in the rainbows which come out between them; there you see how romance is secure in the abstract and the abstract in romance.  Because parallax zooms from acoustic images right to, and all the way through, the kitsch.   He who lies shattered on the beach, an eye half under the water, immersed, wave by wave, in the progressively lapping sea - he sees: salt and grains of sand, the remains of mussels and algae, whose individual, chaotic dancing movements reach right to the cornea.  Here, each grain expresses itself with sound.  Each particle leaves behind traces of friction with which it assures its existence again and again.“The acoustic grains knock at the sight,” thinks the one who lies on the beach.  Then this sailor went over board the Drunken Boat.  He was jettisoned from the romantic vessel.  He sank, “where, flotsam-pale and ravished, drowned and pensive men float by.”  And even though this undead sailor cannot know of the journey of the Rimbaud boat, of the “I…spotted with electric crescents”, he does however see a romantic freedom in the grainy waves of parallax lets himself be inspired by the gliding fusion of the varying scales, becomes slippery like a flying fish, is winged like a shoe of Hermes – and at the same time, still remains the same bundle of nerves: molecular, recombinable, open.