«A Journal of Elasticity» documents the meeting of the Berlin-based experimental sonic magicians – British electronics player Richard Scott and German trumpeter Axel Dörner, playing a two-part composition, recorded at the Großer Wasserspeicher (big water reservoir) in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg in July 2017 during Bohemian Drips’ Speicher – Festival for Site-Specific Music (The Norwegian-British tuba trio Microtub recorded there «Chronic Shift», Bohemian Drips, 2019) . The empty space’s reverberating acoustics played as a third actor during this meeting.
Scott and Dörner have collaborated before, live and in the studio with analog synth wizard Thomas Lehn («Orbit, Dialogue and Trajectory: Live In Berlin», Sound Anatomy, 2015). They were asked by Bohemian Drips to compose and record two sessions—one just by themselves in the water reservoir and another one during which they were surrounded by an audience. Scott worked with a Eurorack modular synthesizer, an EMS synth A and a Ciat-Lonbarde Tetrassi, while Dörner played a unique electronically-augmented trumpet Holton Firebird trumpet linked into live-sampling via Max/MSP and a controller interface developed by Sukandar Kartadinata, and their music was amplified through a hexaphonic sound system.
True to the album title, the two compositions revolve around flexibility and elasticity. These compositions stress a profound understanding of the unpredictabilities of Scott and Dörner palette of sounds, given the complex, electronics-based apparatus and the heavily reverberating acoustics of the water reservoir, shaped by the presence or absence of the bodies of the audience.
The first side of this vinyl release is «The Near-field of an Accelerating Dislocation», recorded without an audience and making full use of the resonating space. The distinct sounds of Dörner’s processed trumpet and Scott’s array of electronics converge and diverge and overlap in space. Together they suggest an enigmatic and subtle yet often tense conversation between a lonesome human voice, including its processed extended breathing techniques, and the unworldly, futurist sounds and noises of its imaginative collaborator. The second side, «Discontinuity within a Continuum in the Presence of Electromagnetic Fields», is a live performance with an audience. It focuses on layered and interwoven texture, again, subtle, fragile and nuanced one and one that explores the full sonic spectrum of Dörner’s electronically-augmented trumpet and Scott’s set of synthesizers and oscillators, as it fluctuates between weird but surprisingly playful sonic events.
Listening with headphones is recommended in order to capture all the nuances of this unique and immersive experience.
Eyal Hareuveni
Richard Scott (Eurorack modular synth, EMS Synth, Ciat-Lonbarde Tetrassi); Axel Dörner (Holton Firebird trt with additional live-sampling).
