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Klanghof: Z​ü​rich Hauptbahnhof

by Claudio Fredo Ignazio Landolt

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1.
( ) 01:39
2.
platform 33 10:11

about

The sounds for this piece were recorded on January 10th & 11th at Zürich Mainstation. I was hunting for sounds with my headphones on, pointing my portable recorder, contact-mics and coil-mics at noise that caught my ear. The basic idea was to hack the audible soundscape of one of the busiest places in central Europe - mainly by searching and presenting its slow side, its negative space.

I was listening for semantic components of the noises and would search for their musical values like rhythm, timbre and pitch. What I found on platform 33, in the underground, was a standing Locomotive, waiting for about 10 minutes in the station before it drove off again. The engine was in some sort of a standby-mode, which „played“ this epic drone-sound, which sounded just like it wanted to imitate the heavenly last chord of the beatles „a day in the life“.

Later on I captured lots of trains leaving and arriving, squeaking brakes, rumbling engines, far away whistles, dancing escalators, rolling suitcases, hurried footsteps, announcements, exhausting steambreaks, opening and closing doors, warning beeps, blurred and far away noisescapes etc. and put it all together by arranging it as if I was composing an ambient piece. Most of the sounds (apart from granular fragmented announcements) were alienated only by slowing them down; and thus, opening up their bright, deep, singing spectrum.

I was aiming for a harmonic tuning of the everyday life, and therefore started hacking and stretching the found sounds. I consider the result as a piece in a post-musique concrète-ideology. Totally aware of the fact, that I am bending the dogmatic rules of the musique concrète-school. I was allowing myself to make an against proposal on the level of soundscape. And yes, it is a coincidence that the great Pierre Schaeffer composed his legendary „Étude au chemins de fer“ exactly 70 years ago. Not that I would dare to draw a line here, but it made me smile when I stumbled across that fact.

credits

released May 1, 2018

license

all rights reserved

tags

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