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´Das Ende von Amerika´ (the end of america) is dis.playce´s second album on naivsuper.
We are very proud to announce our 10th release !!! and what makes it even better is that it´s a new dis.playce CD - one of our favourite artists.
The Album is called ´Das Ende von Amerika´ (The End of America) and it´s dis.playce´s second release on naivsuper. The title refers to the book ´Amerika´ by Franz Kafka and should not be interpretated in wrong way ; )
´Amerika´, also known as ´Der Verschollene´ or ´The Man Who Disappeared´, was the incomplete first novel by Franz Kafka, published posthumously in 1927.
The story describes the bizarre wanderings of a sixteen-year-old European emigrant named Karl Rossmann in the United States, who was forced to go to New York to escape the scandal of his seduction by a housemaid.
Hope originates when something else is absent and holes need to be filled again. The purpose of hope is to make itself vanish again and to reach a state of mind where Utopia or the promised land of North America won´t be needed anymore.
Kafka puts his hero Karl Rossmann over and over again in situations where he is lacking something only to discover that he is lacking even more. The spiral of hope, disappointment and reproaches seems to be endless. With ´Amerika´ Kafka finishes a series of America-fiction from the 19. Century which glorified the United States as the land of boundless possibilities. With Kafka America is not the solution of our problems anymore, it is almost like a second Europe - a land where the problems stay the same.
´Das Ende von Amerika´ is one 24 minute piece published on high quality CDRs.

Hoffnung entsteht dort, wo etwas fehlt, da wo Löcher zu spüren sind. Hoffnung ist der Motor, diese Löcher zu füllen. Das Ziel der Hoffnung ist, sich selbst überflüssig zu machen, einen zufriedenen Zustand zu erreichen, einen, in dem ein Amerika/Utopia als gelobtes Land nicht mehr benötigt wird.
Ausgangsbasis für unser Stück "Das Ende von Amerika" ist der Roman "Der Verschollene" von Franz Kafka aus dem Jahr 1927. Kafka stellt seinen Helden Karl Roßmann immer wieder in Situationen des Mangels, es gibt immer Unzulänglichkeiten, die Karl zu überwinden versucht, nur um dann aus einer völlig unerwarteten Perspektive neuen Mängeln gegenübergestellt zu werden, die ihm jeweils durch Personen seines Vertrauens (sein Onkel, seine Arbeitgeber…) vorgeworfen werden.Kafka hat diesen Roman nicht beendet, die Spirale aus Hoffnung, Enttäuschung und Vorwürfen läuft ins Endlose. Mit dem Verschollenen hat Kafka eine Serie von Amerika-Romanen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert beendet, die dieses als das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten glorifizierten. Bei Kafka wird aus dem Amerika der Lösung unserer Probleme ein zweites Europa,ein Land, indem die Probleme dieselben sind wie zuvor.

first performance of this piece was in Giessen 13.10.2004

artist: dis.playce

titel: Das Ende von Amerika

tracklist:
1. Das Ende von Amerika
full-length: 24:05 min

general:

naivsuper CDR 010 / music by dis.playce / recorded in 2006, mastered at ICEM in 2007 / coverart: Stephane Leonard, Martin Eichhorn / package: naivsuper Team / www.naivsuper.de / www.dis.playce.info / p + c 2007 naivsuper & dis.playce / all rights reserved

format: CDR

price: 6 euro **

order

dis.playce is a German duo consisting of Maximilian Marcoll and Hannes Seidl. They perform compositions using two laptops and various electro-technical equipment, which serve as external sources. Their most recent release, "Das Ende von Amerika", is a single 24 minute piece which is based on Franz Kafka´s incomplete first novel, "Amerika". According to the duo's website, the piece utilizes samples of Varese´s "Ameriques", as well as Allen Ginsberg´s "Howl".

The piece starts with some crunchy, fluttery sounds which fade out around the three minute mark. This gives way to a quiet drone which gradually morphs into some soft clattery sounds. After this fades away, some chiming sine waves pitch-shift up and down, and some more droning sounds come in. It's hard to tell what these sounds are, at times they almost sound like bells, or trumpets, or maybe even human voices. After this, the piece gets noisy, with glitched out sounds flying in and out of the speakers. The piece gets noisiest around the thirteen minute mark, and then abruptly cuts off to what almost sounds like a quiet snoring sound. It stays like this for a few minutes before some more sine waves fade in, and then some more static and clanging sounds. Ginsberg's voice appears right before the 18 minute mark, only to be replaced by the static and clanging sounds a minute later. Eventually the static and processing fades away, and what clearly sounds like a loop sampled from the Varèse piece repeats for a few minutes, fading away before the piece ends.

Overall, the piece has a brittle, tense feel to it, like hiking across a barren arctic landscape. The press release says not to take the release's title the wrong way, so I assume that means that the piece is supposed to suggest the completion of the novel "Amerika", not the demise of this country. It's a bracing listen, to be sure, but it works as sort of a surreal soundtrack to late-night lucid dreaming. 7/10 -- Paul Simpson (29 April, 2008)

This new release by Dis.Playce is the follow up to 'R', reviewed in Vital Weekly, which was not a CDR but a real CD. Now they turn to a CDR. Don't get the title wrong, they say, as it's not about the current state of that country, but inspire by 'Amerika' an incomplete novel by Franz Kafka, which displayed the country not of hope, but of the same problems of the old world, which in it's time was quite a radical idea.
Dis.Playce is a duo of Maximilian Marcoll and Hannes Seidl from Essen, who made their own software called Cooper. They set out a certain structure over which they improvise their material. Yet it seems that use a guitar too, or a sampled version thereof, along side percussion and orchestral bits. Since 'R' it doesn't seem that their material progressed a lot: it balances the line between microsound and noise, although it also seems that the noise prevails here. It's quite an intense piece, these twenty-four minutes, with rougher edges than usual in this field, but perhaps is also a bit too long to hold ones attention throughout. Some more rigid editing would have been in place, I think.
Still pretty much alright (FdW)