In 1733, Voltaire and Rameau collaborated to create the opera "Samson", which was censored and whose music was lost. Claus Guth and Raphaël Pichon revive the spirit of this project, commissioned by the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Samson, isolated by his power, becomes a destructive force through disappointing love affairs. I have contributed sound compositions.
As a sound designer, I helped artist Taryn Simon realize her extensive sound installation "Start Again The Lament" in the Cisternerne Copenhagen. Performed by professional mourners, the work explores how people mourn individually and collectively, considering the anatomy of grief and whom we choose to guide us through it. These sonic rituals of loss and discontent—including northern Albanian, Wayuu, Greek Epirotic, and Yazidi laments—transform the exhibition space into an instrument echoing recitations with a reverberation of seventeen seconds.
Schubert's "swan song" as music-theatre at the Armory Hall in NYC, conceived and directed by Claus Guth, with tenor Jonas Kaufmann and pianist Helmut Deutsch. I have contributed musical interludes and sound compositions that link the songs into one long experience.
For this high-end hydrogen-powered vehicle, I developed an information-driven sound concept for the user interface and an immersive sound installation for the booth at the Paris Mondial d'Auto 2022, where the unveiling of this innovative automobile caused quite a stir.
Experience the famous orchestral suite "The Planets" by Gustav Holst, played by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, as an interactive audio walk in a park near you, increasingly all over the world. All you need is a smartphone and headphones. In addition to being the artistic and technical director and 3D sound engineer, I produced this project.
Lure is an artistic research project I lead that explores machine learning in theater and music. We have explored a variety of machine learning techniques in combination with musical instruments, voice and narration. The artistic research transfers questions on the topics of human–machine interaction and artificial intelligence to the fields of theatre and music.
The just intonation differs clearly from the usual equal temperament in its sound but also in its practicability. On this accordion a third C-E sounds clear and free from beating, while the third B-D, for example, sounds totally sloped and crooked. This offers not only the possibility of playing particularly pure sounds, but also, in a particularly charming way, to play wonderfully iridescently "wrong". This "wrong sounding" is not the result of a randomly detuned accordion, but is determined in an audibly conscious and concrete way.
As part of the RE:ECM exhibition at Storage by Hyundai Card in Seoul, Korea, my piece “Small Places” presents the entire music catalogue ever produced by ECM Records as a sound installation. It is inspired by the game of ping-pong which can be regarded as a metaphor for many aspects in music production: the interaction between producer and musician(s), the give and take between the musicians themselves, but also the active interplay between the listener and the music.
Created in collaboration with digital artist Lars Ullrich, "Flow" lets the visitor experience the motion inside the music. By creating an abstract landscape from the music, the visitor can explore its fluid dynamics and be part of its organic behavior: The listener is literally drawn into the music. "Flow" is part of the RE:ECM exhibition at Storage by Hyundai Card, Seoul, 2019.
The pedestrian zone in front of the Kunsthalle Munich: There, a homeless person appears in the midst of lustfully shopping, well dressed people. In the hopelessness of her existence, she transfigures everything ordinary into art. Sounds from her memory fit into an orchestration of the urban sound space. Everything she hears becomes a global song in which, like Wagner's Isolde, she finds redemption through death and resurrection in love.
