Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Sound on Sound: Contributors' Notes

AGF: LEO'S CODE

Performed and produced by Antye Greie, Berlin, Germany, February 2003. (© Antye Greie)

Contact: AGF, c/o Kitty-Yo, Greifswalder Strasse 29, 2. HH 2 OG, 10405 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: <agf@poemproducer.com> Web site: <poemproducer.com>.

For Leo's Code I used HTML code that I found on a random web site and improvised with it while reading the site's scripts and text fragments. Later, I edited the piece in a way that emphasizes its broken flow of words and content, creating an image of an emotionalized female turtle robot that desperately needs a restart because it has gotten lost in the code.

I created a minimal soundtrack based on two tones, just as computers are based on two tones—1s and 0s. I used a microphone, a pre-amp, an Apple PowerBook, a VX Pocket audio card, Logic, GRM (Group de Recherches Musicales de l'Institut National de l'Audiovisuel) plug-ins, a digital synthesizer and a mouse and a brain for editing.

Born and raised in East Germany, AGF—a.k.a. Antye Greie—has been active as a musician and producer since 1990, playing in the German band Laub as well as performing solo. A member of Berlin's Kitty-Yo label, her responsibilities as the label's web site project manager mutated into an artistic exploration of technology and expression with her 2001 release Head Slash Bauch, in which Greie translated fragments of HTML script and software manuals into a choppy, deconstructed pop format. AGF's recordings have been featured on Mille Plateaux, Disco Bruit, Sprawl, Crosstalk and other labels. Greie was an artist in residence at Podewil, at the Berlin Contemporary Center, in 2001, and contributed a sound installation, Berlin Klang, to Sonar 2000.

M. Behrens: For the Further Consequences of Reinterpretation

Written and produced by M. Behrens, at the composer's studio, Frankfurt a.M., Germany, and Grimacco, Italy, 2002-2003. (© M. Behrens)

Contact: M. Behrens, Brüder-Grimm-Str. 46, 60385 Frankfurt, Germany. Web site: <www.mbehrens.com>.

This track is a product of a process that was started by the Japanese artist Nosei Sakata (a.k.a. *0), who asked other artists to "remix" some of his material for release on the CD *0— 0.000 remix—INFLATION. Sakata had produced a CD that appeared to play back basically nothing (its sound was outside of the human hearing range), and the idea was to create "everything from nothing." When I received my promo copies of the CD I decided to take the process further: I took material from the reinterpretation pieces by Taylor Deupree, Hsi-Chuang Cheng, Aube, Richard Chartier, Akira Rabelais, John Hudak, Bernhard Günter and Steve Roden to construct a further reinterpretation. After the completion of the piece included here, I gave the material to the Portuguese artist Paulo Raposo (of Vitriol), who himself did another reinterpretation. Raposo and I use different methods to compose, as well as different structural approaches, and premiered both of our— however complementary—pieces in the form of a friendly "audio duel" (like a Ping-Pong match) on 21 March 2003 in the auditorium of the Goethe-Institut Inter Naciones in Lisbon. The show was entitled "Further Consequences of Reinterpretation."

Born in Darmstadt, Germany, M. Behrens has lived and worked in Frankfurt since 1991; he also has been a citizen of Elgaland-Vargaland <www.krev.org/> since 1997. After beginning his musical studies in experimental jazz and rock groups in the late 1980s and pursuing a series of tape releases, acoustic feedback recording and multimedia works throughout the 1990s, Behrens today is perhaps best classed as a "sound artist," working across the boundaries of performance, installation and recorded media. He has performed and exhibited extensively across Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, Japan and North America, including appearances at Chicago's Lampo and the Sound Art Exhibition at the InterCommunication Center in Tokyo.

Alejandra & Aeron: Village Football

Written and produced by Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman, La Rioja, Spain, 2003. A longer original version was published as an MP3 project on Datamusik <www.datamusik.com>, Denmark, 2002. (© Alejandra...