Alexander Schubert - A few Plateaus
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This piece is built almost entirely of small audio fragments I found on my hard drive. It features small recordings I or other musicians did. These are used as a basis material to create rhythmic structures, chords etc. The original files don't include chords or anything like it, these things are achieved by transposing and parallel looping of buffers less than a second long - and often just a few milliseconds. So the idea is to create a structure from sort of random chunks of acoustic audio snippets forming a coherent multi-layered complex out of them. Above that it's a play with the quick changes between static repetition and absurdly quick rhythm patterns.
The result sounds very much acoustic and this is the main concept of the piece: the play with the aesthetics of a "normal" acoustic ensemble and the laptop ensemble. This piece couldn't be played by an acoustic ensemble. It couldn't be played by a purely electronic ensemble too, obviously. It's a hybrid in regards to ensemble definition and not less in regards to genre classification as it jumps quickly between jazz, contemporary electronics and pop music - solely trying to avoid the harvested lands of acousmatically layered static electronic drones.

plateaus-small