strøm are Gaudenz Badrutt, pianist and electronic musician (*1972) and Christian Müller (*1971), clarinettist and electronic musician. Under the name of strøm the two artists from Biel mix since 2001 various ingredients: free improvisation with conceptual music, contemporary music ideas with free jazz explosions, down to earth, drifty energy with spherical sound. The duo mixes electro-acoustic chamber music skillfully with allusions to contemporary pop-aesthetics. Both musicians studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts Berne/Biel but exposed themselves to manifold influences which they make use of in an experimental way. Under stage director Barbara-David Brüesch strøm produced a variety of theatre music (e.g. for the Stadttheater Berne, the Staatstheater Stuttgart, Schauspielhaus Wien), played in rock cellars, at art openings, in the scope of installationary open-air concerts and with various musicians, such as Hans Koch, Martin Schütz, Ernst Thoma, Tomas Korber, Urs Leimgruber and Jacques Demierre. Installations in different contexts (e.g. at Bieler Fototage, Passage Kunsthaus Zürich) are another field of work.
strøm homepage
strøm are gaudenz badrutt und christian müller. recorded, edited and mastered at the ‚alpenhof‘, st. anton and in biel. graphic design by medusa cramer. many thanks go to housi, coni, cyler, marc and toby.
realized with the support of stadt biel, swisslos/kultur kanton bern and kulturförderung kanton graubünden
Vital Weekly 682
Three new releases by Swiss based Domizil and the two CDs are debuts. The first is by the duo of Gaudenz Badrutt and Christian Müller, who work as Strøm. They are armed with a bass clarinet, synthesizers and computer and it deems to me that things are recorded in an improvised way, and then edited into finished pieces. Despite the use of a bass clarinet, this work operates largely in the electronic field. Crackles, hum, hiss are employed in a collage like manner. Strøm are all over the place, but to me seem to be working best in a somewhat more quiet and subdued manner, whereas the noisier bits didn’t do much for me. Having said that, I must also admit that the whole CD sounded a bit predictable to my ears. The kind of improvised electronics that is quite good, but also stay on the safe side. Only in ‘Black Sheep’, with its more distinct clarinet sounds and colliding electronic/sine waves seemed to break away from that. Nice but just that.
‘Medir’ means ‘measure’ in Spanish and on his debut Thomas Peter wanted to create music for imaginary spaces. Perhaps too easily I assumed this would be another one of those works with sine wave like drone material, but luckily its not. Its created entirely in the digital domain, using software synthesizers (I assume) and things buzz around indeed, but Peter uses shorter blocks and cut-ups of various clustered sounds, along with more sustained sounds. What or where these spaces are I don’t know, that’s a bit the weak point of the album I think, and how he envisaged that. It seems logical to me that someone would play this in one room as one entire listening session. So I had a bit of a problem imaging these spaces. Or perhaps I just saw it as an excuse to play some electronic music. Having said that I thought his compositions are much more coherent than those by Strøm. There is a greater dramatic tension to be spotted in these eleven pieces and throughout its a pretty strong musical
work. Even in one real room.
Somewhat more complicated is the release by Marcus Maeder. Text in the booklet is entirely in German and so they are on the DVD. From what I understand this is based on Deleuze/Guattari’s ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, which I haven’t read either of course (in any language) and Maeder presents his work as a radio play in Surround Sound (stereo version is also on the DVD), which is funny I think. He uses voices of Artaud, Freud, Helene Barat, Ivan Chtcheglov, Guy Debord, Eliza and music based on Kraftwerk (the title of this CD is based on the ‘Man Machine’), Velvet Underground, Nick Cave and Wagner. So ok, there is a lot to this work, and I simply fail to see/hear it. The music is quite nice actually. Lots of voices, environmental sounds, broken disco beats, machine sounds, such as in ‘Die Produktion Der Produktion’, which is the best piece here. As a radioplay it works quite nice, even for someone with a limited knowledge of the German language. (FdW)
? Download
Downloaded times.
report broken link
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!
