hecker: articulacao

Editions Mego is proud to release Articulação, the latest work by Florian Hecker. Articulação deepens Hecker's collaboration with Reza Negarestani, author of the libretto created for Hinge. In two distinct renderings this piece articulates a complex scene in which the two obelisks of the script -- one from the perspective of nature and one from the perspective of culture -- are recited simultaneously in an informational yet dramatic style. Hinge* features the legendary artist Joan La Barbara as its main voice and is delivered in microtonally converging pitches with sparse sample-accurate time-lags, shifts and twists. The repolarizing phrasings of Hinge recall Artaud's Theater of Cruelty as much as Beckett's minimalist narratives. Here the listener may construct a hinge, a pendulation between the right and the left obelisks; embarking upon navigation and synthesis while tracing the chimeras of nature and culture. In apparent contrast, Hinge** engages the disparate modalities of its sources, complicating any assimilation of their respective traits. With an insight on the complexities of Hecker's chimerized pieces, Robin Mackay summarizes: "According to psychoacoustical research, the brain functions that serve to identify the 'what' and the 'where' of a sound operate upon different timescales, a finding Hecker exploits to produce sequences in which the fine time structure of one voice is sheathed in the amplitude envelope of another, producing an entity that remains recognizable as a voice while being spatially delocalized and semantically scrambled, and which the listener must reconstruct as a unified yet impossible synthetic creature -- a chimera." Between these pieces, Modulator (... meaningless, affectless, out of nothing ...), reveals, in a structural and formal manner, the synthetic means of modulation and topological transformation that appear in disguise in Hinge**. In a sequence of short episodes and chronics, Modulator celebrates the notion of sound as an Immaterial. Its syntheticness and modern generation occurring as a bottom up and top down process across different scales, exciting the human mind's hallucination of objects on the basis of auditory cues, without obvious compounding of a narrative progression. Articulação is an isolated masterpiece of text, sound and synthesis. Includes a 12-page booklet. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Total running time: 79 minutes, 30 seconds.