Andreas Trobollwitsch is a Viennese composer-sound and installation artist, who focuses on electroacoustic composition and improvisation and has composed for dance, theatre, film and radio. His works are based on rotation, vibration and feedback systems. Truba – human turntable – used a rotating, resonating aural installation, five metal tubes, two chairs, and two trumpeters – Alex Kranabetter (of the Gnigler quintet) and Martin Eberle (of Max Nagl Quintet, 5K HD and Kompst 3).
The concept of this rotating aural installation is to trace past sonic events or vibrations frozen in time, something like a seismograph in reverse, mirroring time and translating the recordings back into vibration. The resulting fluctuations in air pressure create pockets of turbulence in space-time, atmospheric micro-detonations, some of them strong enough to blow holes through the fabric of our everyday lives and open up short-lived, fragile areas of free space: playgrounds for alternate nows, rehearsal spaces for counterworlds, portals into different dimensions.
Kranabetter and Eberle played while sitting on the chairs fixed onto the round platform. As the platform spun, the trumpeters blew sound waves repeatedly into six-meter-long tubes. During the performance, the trumpeters explored both the constantly changing and rotation-based acoustical facts, as well as the potential of the tubes to be used and understood in various ways – as an ephemeral extension of their instruments, as a mechanical effect device, and as a rhythmical structure that unfolds in a multi-dimensional composition.
Truba offers an edited, two-dimensional version of this experimental, otherworldly installation, with three pieces composed by Trobollowitsch, and one composed by Kranabetter and Eberle that question even further the timbres of their instruments with playful usage of extended breathing techniques. It does sound like echoes of distant worlds and times, encapsulated in one alien installation. It leaves the listener with many questions about the possible sonic means to communicate with our pasts and futures.
Eyal Hareuveni
Andreas Trobollowitsch (idea, concept, installation), Alex Kranabetter (trumpet), Martin Eberle (trumpet)
HUMANTURNTABLE – TRUBA from Andreas Trobollowitsch on Vimeo.