Aerodynamics

Gatefold jacket. Welcome to the 20th Century : My point of departure for the octet was to treat the ensemble as a flock of clarinets and develop swarm-like scenarios. At the same time, I thought of the 8 players as a kind of acoustic 8-channel-installation with the musicians surrounding the audience. This could be seen as an expansion of the stereo analogy we sometimes work with in The International Nothing. While The Nothin' is all about developing a very personal language of new sounds with self-invented techniques, for the octet I wanted to use 'simple language' only and stay clear of any extended techniques. The idea was for the piece to be playable by any clarinet player, to avoid translation and realization issues in its interpretation. Surrounded by Idiots: The instruction to myself goes as follows: Record nine unedited improvisations of the exact same length (in this case 35 minutes and 19 seconds) imagining improvising with a nonet of nine times myself (without listening to any of the other recordings). While playing, imagine "reacting" to the sounds of the (unheard) nonet. As in any collective improvisation, most likely one wouldn't play during the whole improvisation and there would also be longer or shorter periods where one would just listen and be quiet. No need to start playing right at 0:00, though certainly not before, and no need to play until the end at 35:19, but certainly no sound after. There are (imaginary) musical situations where one takes over the initiative and there are other situations where one rather reacts, follows, adds or just provides little "decorations" to a scenario dominated by other players."-Kai Fagaschinski