Commissioned by: Jeugd en Muziek Vlaanderen
Composed for the “Entartung”-project, in collaboration with Joachim Devillé (animation-film)
In “Not I”, a composition for electric-guitar and live-electronics (2007), I elaborated upon the idea of alienating the relation between instrumental/physical action and the resulting sound through the use of live-electronics. After finishing this piece, I felt the urge to expand this idea to more than one instrument and take it yet one step further. When asked to write a composition for Nadar, I had the perfect occasion to do so. Fremdkörper (2008) and Not I have in common that every instrument is amplified through a guitar amplifier placed next to the musician, and that this amplifier is connected to a system of live-electronics which “intrudes”/”infects” the amplified instrumental sounds. The general approach however was very different for both pieces. In Fremdkörper I started from a situation where the electronically processed sounds and the instrumental sounds are completely different and distinguishable entities, as being two seperate bodies. In the course of the composition, this situation of course undergoes several evolutions, and at a certain point they even form one single “body”. The friction between singularity and plurality, as can be found in the German word fremdkörper, which is singular and plural at the same time, was one of my central points of interest in this composition.
