"...ich entsinne mich..." is an ongoing series of works comprising field recordings that have subsequently been subjected to a series of interventions.

 

At the outset, "...ich entsinne mich..." had an almost diaristic personal significance, in the sense that the locations are not necessarily selected for their sonic interest. Indeed, many of the locations are almost provocatively banal.

 

I'm always a little sceptical when composers try to describe what a piece may be "about", so I try to avoid it as much as possible. I would say, though, that in this case there is a significance to the process of creating the pieces that relates - as the title might suggest - to memory. These recordings form documents that are, by their nature, imperfect and selective, like a diary entry, and which are subsequently edited, often at a much later date. There is an aspect of revisionism in this process, but also an aspect of active engagemeng with one's own past, and the events of one's life. These aspects are, for me, important on a very personal level, although I would certainly hesitate to describe it as being in any way necessarily hermeneutically linked to the pieces.

 

I set myself a number of rules/guidelines/attitudes for the production of these pieces. These may be modified as necessary:

 

1. Every recording made for the purposes of this series must be edited and released as part of this series. In the order of their recording. Given the (sometimes extreme) number of hours required to actually edit these pieces, this will result in an ever increasing temporal distance between recording and editing. One day, I'll be 80 years old, editing something I recorded perhaps decades earlier. This obviously plays into the diaristic quality of the pieces.

 

2. A visual document must be produced at the time of recording. This may be a photo, or a drawing, or whatever. It need not be a documentation of the place, necessarily; it need only have been produced at the same time as the recording was made.

 

3. The banality or interestingness of the location itself is immaterial. The selection of recording location should be as unfiltered as possible.

 

4. These are not field recordings. The recordings serve as material for the production of a musical work.

 

5. The text description of each piece must contain information on its recording location, date and time, as well as the date of its completion. No information about the means of intervention in the recordings is to be provided, although this may in many cases be really obvious from the recording.

 

6. Pieces may have descriptive subtitles.

 

7. A number of different versions may exist of a given piece. Different versions should not radically alter the primary means of intervention.

 

8. Completion is defined as the point at which the "final mix" is bounced to disc. Once this has happened, no further edits or versions are permitted, excepting situations where an "error" must be corrected.

 

Finally, these pieces function, to an extent, as a kind of "proof of concept" for certain opinions or hypotheses I hold about the way in which we might cognitively process information-rich sonic stimuli in a musical context.

 

I'm the last person to tell people how to listen to music (in the sense of statements like "please only listen on deluxe german audiophile headphones or not at all..."), but I will say that these pieces are envisaged as being played back with relatively high fidelity in an audio environment that includes ambient noise (i.e. through loudspeakers), at a "normal" volume (i.e. not necessarily all that much louder than the ambient noise already present in the listening environment). But if you want to listen through the earbuds that came with your phone, or the built-in speakers of your whirring-like-a-jet-engine vintage laptop, nobody's gonna stop you.

 

The pieces are free to stream as a preview, and it's important to me that my music remains free, but please do consider dropping a couple of euros/dollars/pounds/pesos on purchasing the recording. Such small "donations" really go a long way, and are greatly appreciated!

 

Thus far, the following installments have been released:

 

"...ich entsinne mich..." 1 |  03. December 2016, 15:34  |  canal. corner Weigandufer and Rosegger Straße, Berlin

 

"...ich entsinne mich..." 2 | 04. December 2016, | kitchen window, Berlin