Digital Voices by Bernhard Living

The ‘Digital Voices’ album brings together two compositions by the experimental music composer Bernard Living that are based on the spoken word; ‘Composition 2011/03 (Ich Tanze Nicht)’ and ‘Composition 2015/07 (Ольгина история (Olga’s Story)) - and are a development of his exploration with digitally-based minimalistic production techniques.

‘Composition 2011/03 (Ich Tanze Nicht)’ uses a female computer voice that repeats 'Ich tanze nicht (I don’t dance)’ against a sparse and rarified background of slowly evolving sinewave-based tones. In the first half of the composition, the digital voice express a single phoneme of ’t’ - with ‘her’ speech reduced to its single most essential elements. The ’t' is the last letter of ‘nicht’ - and this becomes apparent when the full sentence of ‘Ich tanze nicht’ is heard latter in the composition.

A live performance version of ‘Composition 2011/03 (Ich Tanze Nicht)’ was included in the Corpora Aliena concert at Iklectik, London in November, 2018 - and performed again in July, 2019 at Goldsmiths College, University of London’s as part of the Electropixel digital festival ‘Electronic Bodies and the Abstract Morphology of the Real’, curated by French composer and academic Julian Ottavi.

In contrast, ‘Composition 2015/07 (Ольгина история (Olga’s Story)) has a denser texture and more complex narrative. Made in collaboration with the Russian musician Elena Alekseeva, it is based on a sample that Alekseeva made of the Moscow metro. She also reads the text 'Я двигаюсь во времени и время движется через меня. (I am moving through time - and time is moving through me.)’, which is repeated against a thickly textured background of multi-layered ghost-like whispering voices and the sounds of the metro that becomes an ever present industrial drone.

Tumblr
Twitter