Chuchchepati Orchestra - Der Makrograph: Volume I Mikrogramm 400

Chuchchepati Orchestra
DER MAKROGRAPH
Concert installation for 8 to 32 loudspeakers, large turntable, vinyl and orchestra

18. Sept. 2021 live at Festival "Rümlingen Neue Musik"
www.chuchchepati.ch

While a needle glides in the groove of a classical turntable and translates vibrations into audible tones, a laser beam scans the surface of the sound carrier in the macrograph. The digital data obtained in this way form the source material for the composition. The basic principle of the macrograph is the translation of form into music. For the composition process, this means that the "translation" of the data into music can be determined according to freely definable parameters and that even non-musical topologies can be translated into interesting musical results.
The macrograph is designed as a long-term project: Different volumes will be published one by one.

dieb13, concept, composition, turntable
Patrick Kessler, concept, composition, double bass
Manuel Balzarek, technical realization
Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen, technical realization

www.chuchchepati.ch

Volume I - Microgram 400
The occasion for the concrete realization is a composition commission of the Festival Neue Musik Rümlingen, which in 2021 is dedicated to the work of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. The focus is on his micrograms. In barely decipherable millimeter-small writing, Walser has written down prose texts, poems and dramolettes in the micrograms and thus at the same time refused to publish them. For the commissioned composition "Volume 1 - Mikrogramm 400", Walser's original handwritten version of Mikrogramm 400 is engraved in a spiral on an oversized vinyl record. The data captured by laser scanning of the macrograph form the basis for the composition. By setting to music not the content but external features, indeed the texture of the original text, the mysteriousness of the content remains respected.