At the base of the multichannel sound work “Blau & Rauschbereit” lies an interest in rendering audible that which conventionally or historically is deemed unwanted: noise – in its most literal form as “white noise” – and sonic artifacts of digital processes: cuts, ruptures, and drop-outs. The flutist, on four instruments from basso to piccolo, produces an array of different colors of noise – with noise with all its derivatives from pink to blue noise (blue noise being “Blaues Rauschen” – following a meticulous graphic notation. She plays 21 composed voices in total, 20 of which are prerecorded. The resulting layers of noise are fed into a digital algorithm, based on a Gaussian distribution, which introduces artificial gaps and ruptures to all voices individually and spatializes them to a four-channel sound system. What the audience witnesses is a sound world – a noise world – utterly dense in all its shadings of colored noise, and unpredictable in its temporal shape given the juxtaposition of humanly performed gaps and digitally introduced time artifacts. The emergent spatial texture remains ambiguous in how it is crafted, blending performance and installation, performer and algorithm, continua and gaps, noise and silence.

Written for, and premiered by, Lara Stanic, at Kaskadenkondensator Basel in 2016.