Viennese cellist Lukas Lauermann never stepped on trodden paths. His versatile career swings between experimental, contemporary music and alternative popular music. He collaborated with local Austro-British singer-songwriter-poet Alicia Edelweiss, the indie Donauwellenreiter, Nino from Vienna and Soap&Skin, and performed at the Banksy’s Walled-Off Hotel in Bethlehem, Beijing, and in the Rock Club in Seattle.
Interploitation (a wordplay on the mathematical field of numerical analysis, a method of constructing new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points) is Lauermann’s third album and again he chooses to visit and experiment with uncharted sonic regions. Now Lauermann leaves the cello in its case and plays only on electronic effect devices – samplers and tapes, turns the knobs and controls on his pedals. The nine pieces are reconstructions of existing recordings, made for the soundtrack of Robert Schabus’ documentary Alpenland (2022), about the effects and interactions of human intervention in the spectacular landscape of the Alps.
The polyphonic cello pieces composed for the soundtrack were broken down into individual tracks, passages and individual tones were cut out and transferred to samplers or tapes until their original sound structures were completely dissolved. Lauermann, with his pedal effects, played with the pitches, speed and timbre of these processed and looped sound materials and created austere yet intriguing sonic artifacts, still, capturing the mysterious and suggestive cinematic qualities of film music. These lyrical and ambient pieces are titled as syllables of the three words that capture the message of the documentary film as well as Laurmann’s experimental, poetic sonic equivalent: Interference – Intervention – Exploitation, and Lauermann adds poetic words that further expand on his inventive sonic interpolation: Interference can be intervention / intervention can be exploitation / exploitation is interference / interference can be exploitation / exploitation never is intervention / intervention can be / interference / interpolation / exploitation is always exploitation.
Eyal Hareuveni
Lukas Lauermann (electronic effects)
