Sound Machines Da Capo on Thursday

Every first Thursday of the month (with the exception of 1 January 2009) the exhibiton will be open until 10:00 p.m., offering special events that centre around a main theme. Depending on the event, the exhibition space will be transformed into a concert hall, a cinema or a space for lectures and discussions.

02 10 2008 19:30
movie night
Trautonium by Georg Misch
1998, 25 mins, colour, stereo
English and German with English subtitles

Trautonium portrays a strange personal world, a place beyond time, inhabited by subharmonic scales, frequency-shifters and most of all music of unheard beauty. It is the world of 88-year old inventor, musician and composer Oskar Sala, the keeper of one of the first Synthesizers, the extraordinary Trautonium
Today, his Mixturtrautonium is the last of its kind and Sala remains the only person able to play this instrument and the over 600 pieces or more written for it. On this machine, with its hundreds of buttons and myriads of circuits, he created the haunting sounds for Hitchcock’s The Birds and many other films. Furthermore, he inspired bands such as Kraftwerk, who consider him as the grandfather of electronica. But what stands at the end of a life devoted to a machine now threatened with extinction?

06 11 2008 19:30 Uhr
„surfing in the arctic“ – a polivoks-session at the ice break
Eva Ursprung

„finally an instrument which could be played in the depth of winter in the taiga. or even in the arctic. it ist (nearly) water-resistent and sounds crystal-clear and cold as ice. that is the myth. the musician courageous glides through melting ice-floes in the channel between the oscillatores out onto the wonderworld of breakers. there it is wild and sometimes dirty. it squirts and roars and rumbles, everything that comes along gets surfed without restraint, triangle, rectangle, sawtooth, floe or mountain. hoping for a gentle sinus that would wash her ashore safely again.“ Eva Ursprung

04 12 2008 19:30 Uhr
„trautonium jetztzeit“
Liesl Ujvary und Oliver Stummer

„the trautonium, invented in 1930, as electronic synthesizer, offers immense possibilities for creating sound. is has been used in compositions by hindemith and genzmer as well as to create extreme sound tracks for films – the sound in hitchcock’s the birds, singing birds, flapping of wings, originates from the trautonium only and not perhaps from the nature. As the electronic part in the trautonium is controlled by a complex mechanic also the feel is of importance and it demands a skilled player. we would like to confront the sound possibilities of the current electronic and its instruments with the classical trautonium. three levels will be audible: the trautonium with its original sound, the trautonium mixed with a tool-set and altered, an electronic trautonium-module will be confronted with the original and finally all sound generators merge into a coda.“ Liesl Ujvary