Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
BONUS ITEM: BOOKLET
Purchasable with gift card
€13EUR or more
3CD
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
3CD + 16 page booklet
Includes unlimited streaming of Wall Of Sound : Drones/Patterns/Noises Performed by Ulrich Krieger
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
It is a physical and sensual approach to the phenomenon of thick sound worlds. Sound waves become physical objects, four-dimensional sonic sculptures to be experienced, bodily and mentally.
Walls of Sounds is a series of CDs about music that invites the listener to indulge themselves in sound. It doesn’t guide an audience through a narrative—like a song—, but offers the listener slow changing and developing soundscapes, acoustic sculptures, to immerse themselves in. How listeners move in and through these sounds is up to them: meditative drifting along, focusing on certain small details of sounds, letting themselves be taken away by emerging psycho-acoustic phenomena or going back and forth between listening attitudes.
credits
released July 16, 2013
Drones
Drones - long sustained tones that do not move and do not connect to build melodic phrases or Western traditional harmonies.
Drones are ancient. Drones can be found in most cultures around the world, in folk and art music, sometimes alone, sometimes as support and basis for melodic lines. Due to the slowness and static character of drones, often unheard but always present and naturally occurring acoustical phenomena such as beatings (Niblock, Cage, Lucier), difference tones (Lucier, Tenney), and summation tones (Niblock, Tenney) can emerge.
Patterns
Patterns: short melodic motives that get repeated over and over again.
Repetition is not new in Western music, but constant non-developmental repetition of short melodic figures is. Consistently repeating short four- or five-note phrases over a long period of time (Reich, Glass, Riley) creates quasi-static, some would say meditative, soundscapes directing the audience to experience the psychoacoustic phenomena, which emerge out of these repetitions, rather than the source material itself. With neither further melodic material added nor further developments, these patterns quickly lose their melodic aspects and new rhythmic (Glass, Reich), melodic (Riley), and structural (Reich) patterns start to emerge, as well as psychoacoustic phenomena—for example the phase shifting in Reed Phase—creating soundscapes and structures that shift constantly, playing tricks with our perception.
Noises
Noises: superimposition of non-harmonic, irrational non-integer, non-periodic wavelength ratios, not following an overtone series distribution, often, but not necessarily, in close vicinity to each other (close frequency clusters).
While Drones and Patterns still use and re-define basic traditional musical material—sustained tones and melodies—, noise as musical material, not just as a novelty effect, is new to the 20th and 21st century. Noise disregards conventional tones and fully plunges into the full, non-discrete, continuous spectral range of human hearing and perception as source material. Traditional theories of consonance-dissonance, all based on the concept of tone—defined as consisting of integer, harmonic, periodic cycles—and musical intervals, have no meaning with this new type of irrational, non-cyclical noise material. With noise’s little-to-no use for these older concepts of musical material, new artistic strategies and approaches appropriate for this new type of musical source material need to be considered, developed and tested. New sonic landscapes and new formal schemes emerge out of the constructions of these noise-walls.
Toronto artist Jonathan Relph works through depression on this bleak and beautiful album, half dream-pop and half ambient. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 18, 2020
