The Roedelius Cells

An Audio Installation by Tim Story

Piano by Hans-Joachim Roedelius

“Extraordinary… a highly-successful celebration of the work of two internationally-recognized artists... Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the installation was the high number of visitors who stayed throughout the entire duration of the hour-long audio cycle, often remaining well into the next before pulling themselves away from this immersive and deeply satisfying visitor experience.”

(Scott Boberg, Manager of Programs/Toledo Museum of Art)

“Intriguing, challenging, and charming, not just in turn, but in marvelously complex variations of all three... The Roedelius Cells comes to us with a new variation of brilliance, a new way of discovering sonic expression, a fresh redefinition of the borders of composition.”

(John Shanahan, Hypnagogue)

The Roedelius Cells Brief pdf

Previous Installations:

Europe premiere: Kunstverein, Baden, Austria 2016

US premiere: Toledo Museum of Art Toledo, OH USA 2017

Figge Museum, Davenport, IA USA 2018

Big Ears Festival, Knoxville, TN USA 2019

Chiasso/Letteraria Festival, Switzerland 2019

Arnulf Rainer Museum, Baden, Austria 2019

Special Statement

We believe that art is never more vital than it is in difficult times. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it critically important for artists, venues, and arts organizations to quickly adapt to monumental changes in the way art and music can be presented to the public. Because of its inherently flexible design, The Roedelius Cells is particularly well-suited for exhibition in challenging, malleable circumstances. Easily scalable from intimate personal spaces to large public ones, indoors and out-, the installation can elegantly accommodate timed admission and evolving social distancing guidelines. Indeed, the simplicity of operation and minimal staff interaction allows the installation to play to its conceptual strengths - intimate personal interactions are greatly enhanced by smaller groups of people over extended periods of time. We are committed to working closely with exhibitors in order to bring a safe and meaningful experience to our audiences and sponsors.

We are currently offering The Roedelius Cells for exhibition in 2021/22.

Brief

The Roedelius Cells is a unique multichannel audio installation created by Grammy-nominated American composer/sound artist Tim Story, featuring original piano recordings by esteemed German composer/musician Hans-Joachim Roedelius.

Over the course of nearly two decades of musical collaboration, long-time friends and colleagues Story and Roedelius captured many hours of the latter’s intuitive solo piano improvisations. Rediscovering these unused recordings years later, Story began treating them more as building blocks than finished compositions. Repurposing very small edits of this material into layered, evolving patterns, Story painstakingly built compositions solely from these 'discarded' piano recordings, but which ultimately bore little resemblance to Roedelius’ originals.

Short, repeating layers – consisting of thousands of fragments, each often just a second or two in duration – create a complex, syncopated interplay more akin to American minimalism, or a Bach fugue, than to Roedelius’ informal lyricism. Bits of extraneous noise and casual conversation from the original sessions occasionally get swept up into the evolving cycles, creating a kind of disarming human percussion that deliberately exposes and preserves the project’s unique origins.

To extend the process of ‘re-composition’ to participants themselves, Story incorporates a playback system that divides the individual layers of each piece discretely amongst eight speakers. Like the pixels in a video image, or the dabs of paint in an impressionist painting that dissolve into abstraction the closer one approaches, so do the cells surrender their cohesion and re-coalesce in unique and unrepeatable ways for each individual participant as they explore the soundstage.

Challenging ideas of authorship, appropriation and composition itself, The Roedelius Cells blurs distinctions between composer and listener, and slyly subverts assumptions of what piano music can be. An affectionate celebration of the rare artistry of his friend Roedelius, it is also a profound expression of Story's fascination with the human mind and its restless search for order and beauty in the clutter of the everyday. In its embrace of process and interaction, its synergies of temporal and physical spaces, the Cells becomes as much a statement about experiencing art as it is a resonant, moving experience of its own.

Concept

It’s been said of sound art that “one man’s noise is another man’s music.” The Roedelius Cells imagines the possibility that one man’s music might also become “another man’s music.”

In the course of recording several music projects over the past decade, long-time collaborators Tim Story and Hans-Joachim Roedelius captured many hours of Roedelius’ intuitive solo piano improvisations. Rediscovering these extended recordings years later, Story began treating them more as building blocks than finished compositions. Recombining very small edits of this material into layered, evolving patterns, Story painstakingly built compositions solely from the source piano recordings, but which bore little resemblance to Roedelius’ originals. These short, repeating, interlocked layers – consisting of thousands of fragments , each often just a few seconds in duration – create a syncopated, shimmering interplay more reminiscent of Steve Reich’s structured minimalism than Roedelius’ expansive lyricism. Bits of extraneous noise and conversation from the casual sessions occasionally get swept up into the evolving loops, creating a kind of eerie human percussion. To extend the act of ‘re-composition’ to the listeners themselves, Story incorporates a playback system that spreads the individual layers discretely amongst 8 speakers, so that travelling through the physical space changes the fundamental perception of the cells’ interactions in unique, evolving and unrepeatable ways.

Artist Statement

“I’ve always been fascinated how we humans continually create order out of randomness, how our brains construct ‘compositions’ out of the haphazard sounds and visuals of everyday life. Creating audio art from ‘found sounds’ is nothing new, composers of musique concrète and audio collage have been doing it since the advent of audio recording. But what if these found sounds were not recordings of events in nature or industry, but rather bits and pieces culled from someone else’s musical performance? This ‘music made from music’ is often radically removed from the original piano pieces played by Joachim – but though his performances have been mercilessly chopped, interrupted and rearranged, the innate lyricism and delicacy of his playing magically survive.

“Systems music of this kind depends so much on the audio content that is subjected to the process. In Cells, the exclusive use of piano – one of the most universally recognizable of Western instruments - encourages the listener to both focus on the conceptual process itself, and engage with the work in a more viscerally musical way. Most importantly, this familiarity allows Cells to quietly subvert expectations of what ‘piano music’ can be. Like the pixels in a video image (or the dabs of color in impressionist painting) that dissolve into abstraction the closer one approaches, so do the cells surrender their cohesion and re-coalesce into new patterns as listeners explore the soundstage.

“The word cells was chosen deliberately – it refers both to the audio building blocks layered into each composition, and to the word’s organic biological meaning– the intensely personal expression that seems to flow so effortlessly from my friend Joachim’s musical DNA. So, whose music is this, anyway? There’s no easy answer, but by encouraging the listener to become collaborator, and fundamentally reinterpret my reinterpretations by the way in which he or she moves through these cells, I hope to bring the act of ‘composing’ full-circle.”

Technical

An audio installation consisting of 8 equally-spaced audio monitors (preferably self-powered) in a circular configuration, and an 8-channel audio playback device (which will be supplied). The size and specifications of the audio monitors will vary based on the dimensions of the intended gallery/listening space, and the power requirements necessary to achieve optimal sound levels. The playback device consists of a self-contained solid state computer processor and a multichannel audio interface which deliver the 8 discrete channels of synchronized audio. Programmed to load automatically and loop indefinitely upon power-up, the installation is suitable for short and long-term exhibition with minimal oversight.

The Artists

Grammy-nominated American composer Tim Story has been called “a master of electronic chamber music” (CD Review, USA), and a “true artist in the electronic medium” (Victory review, USA). Through three decades of influential recordings and live performances, Story’s unique blend of careful composition and innovative sound design has garnered a dedicated worldwide following.

Austria-based German composer Hans-Joachim Roedelius has profoundly influenced generations of musicians in a career spanning more than a half-century and over 100 solo and collaborative recordings. From his groundbreaking duo Cluster with Dieter Moebius, to his genre-crossing solo works and collaborations with luminaries including Brian Eno, Roedelius is recognized as one of Europe’s most important sound pioneers. Equally at ease with the most abstract of electronics and the most evanescent of piano solos, Roedelius has exerted an indelible, global impact on ambient, electronic, experimental, and wholly undefinable genres of music.

Longtime friends and colleagues, Roedelius and Story have collaborated on many musical projects, including the acclaimed albums Lunz (2003), Inlandish (2007), and Lazy Arc (2014). The duo’s most recent collaboration, Lunz 3, was selected by National Public Radio as a best of 2019 release.

Inquiries: russ@curiousmusic.us