Ambient Gisbert Schürig
Between the Sounds

21st of February 2016 I played for Elma Riza performing 'Between the Lines#9' at Raumteiler, Berlin.

In the 'Between the Lines' series, Elma works with a limited sets of elements, applies a few rules to unfold an open process of performance and installation, exploring what comes along the way in a calmness and concentration, always shifting between activity and contemplation.

I love to make music in such a context, slowly making changes in an ableton live set on my laptop I feel like a fish in the water. My ableton setup for today´s improvisation was based on four instances of the Patter device by Adam Florin. Similar to phyla´s practice in minimal improvisation with fellow musicians and dancers, these devices have the courtesy to not act strictly in terms of timing but to 'wait until it´s their turn', thus creating sequences of fixed order but differing lengths. Isn´t that poetic?
For more rhythmic phrases and bubbly textures I used several instances of stacked midi delays which were triggered by one of the Patter devices.
Sound-wise I used very few sources: sine waves and noise from ableton´s analog device, samples of pieces of metal, an african balafon and an indonesian saron barong I recorded a few years ago. And lots of reverb, different reverbs and finally Ircam´s Multiband delay.

Listening to this improvisation I hear church bells, someone stringing a bathtub, some of that stuff even sounds like a coffee machine, none of which did I intend. But I like the physicality of the sounds that makes these images come up, actually, I would like to take a bath in that tub while someone is make sounds with it. But the more scary part for me is the sounds that are musical in a more traditional sense, the intervals, the short melodic fragments. Morton Feldman stated that he need´s his music - which is usually played very softly - to be played on instruments with the charisma of a long history. Triggering sine waves in my laptop I am not sure about the charisma of this instrument. But I do know for sure that I love the flow of setting things in motion within the software and navigate the processes while they are running.