Komet | Arc, Live @ SWR Freiburg | 18.04.00
AB-CD | F.0018.0003
Komet (Frank Bretschneider) is a prolific artist, having released works on Raster-Noton (which he co-founded with Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender), 12k, Mille Plateaux and Fällt/BiP-HOp among others. His work has received widespread critical acclaim having been described as "delicate, silvery toned minimalism... the brief presence of pulses, played against faint longer resonances on certain bass beats, or the odd, quietly visible noise-drone or cyber-cicada" (The Wire).
'Arc' features excerpts from a performance by Bretschneider in April 2000 during a night for electronic music at the SWR radio station in Freiburg. The ‘Experimentalstudio’ there has a prestigious pedigree - Stockhausen, Nono and Boulez having worked there in the past. Bretschneider states:
"For this concert I changed the second part of the set I normally played, to try some tracks I had just worked on for a new CD (released later that year as 'Rausch' on Taylor Deupree's 12k label). My idea was to generate music from just sinewaves and white noise."
"I used a CD player connected to the audio-ins of my Nord Modular synthesizer. On the CD I had some pre-recorded sounds and a click track to sync the Modular, so I was able to manipulate/modulate the sound from the CD and to play additional sequences and sounds at the same time."
The series of tracks featured on 'Arc', explores similar territory to 'Rausch' but develops it within a live context. Opening with very minimal pulse beats and short tones the CD evolves slowly until it reaches a point, towards the end of the disk, where the listener is convinced they’re hearing pop songs and hooks. The result is five tracks of precise minimalism tempered within a brittle spaciousness that is characteristic of Bretschneider’s work.
The Fällt Live Series features artwork by Fällt designers Fehler which utilises the AB-CD format's unique characteristics by printing in reverse around the transparent outer edge to create a CD which effectively appears double-sided. The artwork was recently featured in Creative Review and 'CD Art - Innovation in CD Packaging Design' (RotoVision).
'Arc' illustration [Edit], cf. Bird, J O and A J C May. Mathematics 3 Checkbook. London: Butterworths, 1981. (ISBN 0 408 00611 0)
