Opera by Paul* Hermansen

A satirical glitch opera inspired by dreams, dread and the internet.

For computer, virtual orchestra and synthesized soloists.

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"One of the really great joys of presenting The Sound Barrier each week is that of introducing to the show’s audiences new and emerging composers, or even relatively well-experienced ones, who are not yet widely known. Even alongside some of the greatest and most celebrated composers, these lesser-known artists can reveal startlingly exciting and creative talent, which often just drives home the point that the line between fame and the lack of it often has little to do with merit.And so it is in this context on this edition of the show that I present a major new work by German composer and improvisor Paul* Hermansen: their 2022 work fixed media composition in three Acts, Opera.Opera is one of those pieces that inhabits territory that only music seems able to reach: that ambiguous place, partly tantalising and partly terrifying, that sits nestled deep within human psyches and cultures. In Opera that space is clothed in the unsettlingly freaky world of computers and Artificial Intelligence. Sounds are generated by a fusion of synths, samples, and a smorgasbord of software, all of which come together in a collage both of sonic diversity and of psychic restlessness and dislodgement.We hear at the beginning the sound of what seems like a computer firing up and a text telling us of a cataclysmic future of which we are incapable of comprehending. So, instead, we are taken into an alien world, a virtual reality where the distinction between what is virtual and what is real collapses. We recognise things but we can’t quite place them, and they are not quite what we thought them to be. We are detached and immersed at the same time. We are sometimes hurried along in a world hyper-charged with the sounds of frenzied consumerism and machinated information. Nothing is real and yet this seems to be the only reality. Menace is lurking everywhere – sometimes asserting itself to the fore, sometimes lurking in the shadows cast by a glare we cannot entirely trust.Omens are ambiguous, like the tolling bells that open the Second Act over a warped soundscape that undulates with increasing tension and drags us slowly but inescapably into a war-like crisis of near-cosmic proportions. Or then there is the glitchy, deceptive calm with which the Third Act begins, and it slowly plants in us a reflective sense of lost or aliened worlds and cultures that ultimately culminates in an apotheosis that could be tragic, or maybe ecstatic, or maybe ironic. Or maybe ultimately, in this world, they are all the same. It fades away and we are left wondering if what we have experienced has been a dream, or maybe a computer game: a fake world conjured by psyches and algorithms that, rather than distracting us from the cataclysm about which we were warned at the beginning, ultimately only presented the nightmare to us in another form.The excitement of Paul* Hermansen’s Opera is a new and striking example of what this adventurous young composer and improviser is doing, and we can only hope that their practice continues to grow and to be appreciated.When you strip away all the glitz of the musical mainstream, and its commercial drivers, you are left not with a barren cultural landscape but rather the very opposite of this – a rich and fertile topography of new and creative ideas that lack nothing other than a spotlight."

- Ian Parsons of The Sound Barrier (PBS): https://www.pbsfm.org.au/program/the-sound-barrier

Dead Hound Records is a (very) small DIY imprint run by Ollie Turbitt in Edinburgh, specializing in experimental digital releases, tapes, USBs and zines which expose the unsung sonic underbelly of Scotland and beyond.
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deadhoundedi@gmail.com

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