echo_von_nichts: “wunderkammer”

“Wunderkammer” was an attempt during the European Renaissance to create spaces where journeys through space and time could be facilitated using real and artificial objects.

“Wunderkammer” by Pina Rücker uses ancient music artifacts, such as Gregorian chants, and practices these melodies in objects of future technology. Additionally, we create new sonic spaces by extending the duration between individual notes, expanding the “present of hearing.” Fascinated by the fact that our memory biologically can only recognize a melody if the sounds are less than three seconds apart, we try to melt experiences and expectations. The concert seeks to capture various dimensions of time musically.

ZEITKRISTALL (wunderkammer) becomes an audible crystallization point of four time forms. At the core of the work are analog sounds from the material silicon dioxide, accessing various musical monuments/artifacts (melodies) from the European Middle Ages to the Renaissance (the heyday of wunderkammer). These are used as a means of contact with the historical (linear) perception of time; the folk songs and pieces of Gregorian chants are geographically (spatially) rooted in Europe.

Sound becomes a memory image itself, creating contact with the cultural substratum, where the coexistence of past and future in sound and material merges in the heard/experienced present. These melodies are slowed down through the particular vibration of the sounds – microscopic microtonal spatial sound movements within the melodies are created in the recording: unique sound spaces behind the lines.

Time is thus captured as historical space and, in the present of hearing, as an expanding melodic space, within which again, individual spaces emerge within a melodic line – an additional space-time aspect is created or becomes depictable. The sounds serve as an interface to the molecular realm of sand and water as well as a temporal core fusion of historical sound artifacts and future technology.

A time travel in multiple respects emerges; the sound objects are melting space and breeding ground for future time.