"sicht 04 etc." double-CD by Stephan Wittwer, domizil 22

(Document under construction; pardon my english)

sicht 04 etc. is a quite colourful album. There is nearly no "live" guitar playing on it, but disembodied sounds of this instrument are omnipresent. The music was developed mainly at the computer, utilizing the programming language and environment SuperCollider.

CD 1: etc.

consists of shorter and longer pieces, including some strange artificial animals' noises, industrial fantasies, memories of concerts and rooms of the past, organic rank growth (often with stochastic processes which lead to a different rendering of the compositions each time the program code [ = the score ] gets executed - but, sorry, on the CD the music is fixed and frozen).

1 Strange Animals I 1:08
2 Dresden 1989 2:40
3 Zürich 1997 6:32
4 In A 15.15
5 Strange Animals II 1:55
6 LSRM stereo 11:43
7 Strange Animals III 2:00
8 Encore (des Partiels) 1:49

CD 2: sicht 04

comprises one single very long piece:

1 sicht 04 51:31

It develops very slowly, is very harmonic, often very quiet, the time seems to stand still, it attemps to be "beautiful" sometimes, some parts of it might get used as "functional" music for meditation or relaxation...
But there are dense moments, dynamic and sensuous.

The basic compositional source material for sicht 04 is partly based on ideas developed for music commisioned by visual artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss in the nineties for their slowly overlapping slideshow called "Sichtbare Welt". The european TV station "arte" played hours of this work late at night during the whole Documenta 10.

sicht 04 is new music but is utilizing samples which were made for the above mentioned piece - with low harmonics of a detuned acoustic steel string guitar. Since the three root notes are tempered chromatic fourths apart, there is a clash of tonal systems, on the one hand banal and dulcet, on the other microtonal and dissonant.

Another element is layers of synthetic prime number harmonics on the same root notes like the guitar flageolets. Once there are very many partials this results in bell-like sounds.

All the music of CD 2 is based on this reduced choice of materials.
There are two exceptions.

...

sicht 04 etc.

is different from my last CD streams for the Cologne-based label GROB in that it is often constructed using sonic particles - where streams was about electronically processing longer "real-time" guitar recordings - preserving their human gestural expressive playing attitudes.

Another aspect regarding playing and processing is in my live piece Musik ohne Bilder which is something between instrumental improvisation and algorithmic composition.

sw, march 2004, Zürich

All music by Stephan Wittwer (SUISA)
Studio Mü Corporation www.wittwer.mu
Published 2004 www.domizil.ch

Thanks to Peter Fischli and David Weiss (cover art) and Taktlos-Bern
Artwork: Medusa Cramer

Homepage: wittwer.mu
Contact: "mail"