naivsuper:totalaction

REVIEWS

DISPLAYCE "R" - THE WIRE 8/2005 - Edwin Pouncey

The cover design of shattered typography that spreads like shards of broken glass or chunks of shrapnel perfectly describes the musical contents within - an ingenious collage of glitch, ambience and noise. Seamlessly assembled by Maximilian Marcoll and Hannes Seidl, R«s nine sections switch from full force electro boost to dripping tap, laptop sound sculpting in mere seconds. Emotions are tossed like salad, while sounds are explored and blended into a heady cocktail of mixed moods and itchy atmospherics. Dis.playce displace twist the accepted formula of contemporary electronic music into another, more ungainly contortion.

Squeak, shake, clonk, hiss. The Nintendos are on release. Maximilian Marcoll and Hannes Seidl have recorded an electro album on which everything has been condensed to the utmost imaginable degree. Breathless. An adventure. It’s not concerned with noise but with a permanent re-input of sonic information which apparantly starts to emancipate itself straight afterwards, twitching boisterously through space. Passages that persist, that developed according to a clear-cut pattern are scarce. Rather space is being opened up for a (seemingly) anarchy of sounds. Chaos would be the wrong denomination for this (as always within the context of anarchy). Playfulness pins it down much better.

Patch and Fragment - The composer duo dis.playce
On their debut album ‘R’ Maximilian Marcoll and Hannes Seidl present electronic music which seems to be the outcome of their reasoning with an extreme sound-aesthetic position. Although the choice of the basic sonic material doesn’t show any dogmatic approach the compositions altogether are shaped stylistically by an abstract, sharp-edged percussive texture. Thus synthetic sounds, recorded sounds and orchestra samples are being edited by aid of the 1985 developed software Csound or the environment COOPER, which has been programmed by Maximilian Marcoll in Max/MSP. However the result cannot be framed by neither sonic referentiality nor spectral abundance. The compositions which appear to be extremely broken up into patches regarding the frequency spectrum are defined by a modular structure of non-causal layering of fragments. The listener is continuously confronted with the paradox of on the one hand carefully presented but on the other hand seemingly arbitrary eruptions. The configurations waver in a dramatic equation tilting towards brute clenchedness and its iterative relaxation. ‘R’ is the description of this state in small parts.

The release department of a Bremen/Berlin based artist collective engaged in audiovisuals and dedicated to making films, producing sound collages and composing experimental music, put this specimen of their post avant-garde adventures’ current direction into my mailbox. Already the eye catching cover by the naivsuper design team shows that the eyes are invited to listen too. Dis.playce is a duo consisting of Maximilian Marcoll (*1981), drummer and former head of the Ensemble für zeitgenössische Musik (Ensemble for contemporary music), Lübeck, and Galette Seidl (*1977 in Bremen). They founded in 2002 when both of them were studying composition at the Folkwang-Hochschule (Folkwang college), Essen. In the meantime being regarded with multiple stipends and awards Seidl continued his studies at the IEM Graz and is currently working with the Ensemble Modern. Being an electro-duo they work with analogue synthesizers and digital processing, or with laptops and the gaming environment COOPER as well as pieces of electronic construction units. With this equipment and the help of self rolled softzware they generate a series of controlled sound ex- and implosions out of samples and field recordings. Each of the 8 tracks is characterized by a carefully chosen construction process or a concrete emphasis on material. As in the microphone R5 plastic foils and beer cans are being exploited as sources. In R6 water and body sounds serve as sonic foil. In R7 insects play the main part and in the somewhat immersed R8 some additional pulverized orchestra samples. The sequence R1 – R8 is reflecting the progress in material and the growing ability to handle complex noise art. The abstract and the concrete converge energetically straight from the beginning when dis.playce are turning sonic space with ardour into a four dimensional Pollock-like dribbling, when they expose sound molecules to electron fire and provoke harsh collisions.
New music for new processes, sonic fiction without cheesy romantics but with sensors reaching deep into thunderstorms of electrons and particle hails.

A few years ago, sometimes you picked up the phone and all you heard were these shrill, high pitch screaming noises sent by a computer. Communication undecipherable to humans. Every time this happened you thought you’re ears were severely hurt and put down the phone. But not this time. This time you start listening. Your brain starts to realize there are patterns within the noise. You’re strangely absorbed, sucked in and opened up to a genuine new layering of distorted sonic artefacts. You feel like being the partitioned input of a recursive algorithm producing chaos. “R” is the name of the new album issued by the german composer duo dis.playce on the adventurous art label naivsuper. By using laptops, self-coded software and bits and pieces of electronics Hannes Seidl and Maximilian Marcoll create multi dimensional spaces populated by centres of gravity around which fragments circulate discontinuously, broken up over and over again and rearranged by acoustic laws of physics and fantasy. Sonic quanta, neither particles nor waves. And when you finally put down the phone after extreme phases of floating above ground reality seems blurringly sharp.

Another new CD / CDR label from Germany, even when the release by Dis.Playce is already the fourth one, this is my introduction. Dis.Playce is the ongoing collaboration between Maximilian Marcoll and Hannes Seidl from Essen, who have been playing together since 2002. Besides using custom written software on their laptops they use electro-acoustic devices such as small coils, piezo elements or alarm signals. The material on their CD was recorded between 2002 and 2004. It took some time before the release grew on me. Upon initial hearing I thought the material was too restricted to the realms of microsound, even when there were a few outbursts of noise, with the usual glitches, cracks and careful built ups, but after a few rounds of listening, the fine dynamics of this release started to work. Dis.Playce knows how make a good balance between the ever so careful side of microsound, but it's the occasional noise elements that make this into a finely shaped work that is full of tension and surprise. Elegant and delicate but with a sharp edge.