site-specific composition:

DECON SOUND with the HAUS DER STATISTIK

During the Corona pandemic, our lives and global politics have been shaped by statistics more than ever before. Statistics illustrate and control what would otherwise be neither visible nor comparable. They enumerate life and thus seek to protect it. The hygienic constraints that follow from them prohibit physical contact. All of this reverberates endlessly in the echo chambers of the media.

How can we prevent infection by the virus, yet make contact through art? We can touch people with art even without physical contact. But how can we obtain feedback from our exchanges?

The House of Statistics used to stand for the administration of statistics. This historically concrete space is deconceptualized in this drone concert as a common place of (non-) touch: touch doesn't necessarily mean contact.

For this space, Stefan Römer has extended his piece ’Deconstructivist Sound’, which functions according to specific deconstructivist principles, to four electronically amplified guitars. The drone thus produced will set the audience vibrating along with the architecture – symbolically transforming it into a temporary "social sculpture": Let (t)here be noise and feedback…

recording on May, 25 2021

four guitarists:
Ale Hop
John Miller
Cosey Müller
Wendelin Büchler

word score for the performance by Stefan Römer:
four guitarists strike only the A string, amplified and reverberating from the four corners of the space
four individual settings of amps and effect pedals

duration: 23 min.
beginning and end is determined by the guitarists
substance: is up to the individual performer

recording and engineering
Alexander Bornschein

Posterdesign
Dirk Lebahn

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Funded by the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme
and by Berlin’s Senate Office for Culture and Europe