The Last Place (Left)
Live Music Project + Music Tech Setup
Hybrid Instrumental + Technological Timbre
With Katryn Hasler (strings) and Florine Juvet (accordion)
2011
“THE LAST PLACE (LEFT)” is a fragile sound world which moves familiar things into a surprising light. The deliberate surrender of virtuosity and melody puts the focus entirely on the inner self of the sound and the rhythm patterns that are derived from prime number permutations. Subtly “handcrafted” electronic sounds mix inseparably with the baritone violin (low violin) and accordion, both instruments used here in a way that is reminiscent of synthesized sound. “THE LAST PLACE (LEFT)” is at the same time machined poetry and at times a groovy sound world, a richly composed sonic matter oscillating between ambience and beats, realized with advanced music technology, yet implemented all in real-time, on stage.
The record is available at Tonus Music Records.
This project was extensively toured between 2008 and 2012 all over Europe.
My role: composition, live performance, recording
Mixdown and mastering was outsourced to industry recording studios
Isomorph
String Quartet
28 Minutes
2016
Although Isomorph is an entirely acoustic piece of music, Zaes’ background of electronic music is clearly audible. Additive principles deriving from electronic music synthesis are the basis. It is a delicate work, which negates romantic expression and virtuosity, but while rejecting large gestures it perhaps leads the performers to a calm, yet highly bodily form of virtuosity: the music needs an extreme level of precision and synchrony between the four players in order that the technology-inspired sound succeeds. In this 30 minute, mostly quiet work, the fragile textures emerge from the precarious social body that is the string quartet.
World premiere, 2016, with Classicus Quartet Budapest, Réka Baksai - violin, József Rácz - violin, Péter Tornyai - viola, Tamás Zétényi - cello
American premiere in Boston, 2016, with Kate Outterbridge - violin, Josie Davis - violin, Ashley Frith - viola, Laura Cetilia - cello
In the Plains Of
Music Composition with Video
Remediation of Participatory City Recordings
Performative environment for heavily amplified chamber ensemble
(bass flute, viola, cello, Casio keyboard, voices and electronics)
60 min
2020
“In the Plains Of” explores how societies document the worlds around them to shape their perception of the "world." It views journaling as a tool for world-building, both a product of colonial expansion and a means for personal expression, creating imaginary worlds lies at the core of interest. In the original version, the ensemble ö! musicians were prompted to document their everyday commutes to work using ubiquitous everyday technology like phones. This archive of sounds and images informed the media-driven concert. Zaes expanded chamber music by combining ensemble ö! with a media collage. The composition merges field recordings and transcriptions thereof with live instrumental performances, inspired by Western transcriptions of colonialist Pacific scales, addressing imperialist musical exoticism. A technological system rhythmically manipulates the sounds, highlighting the fragmentary nature of the materials. Visually, the work occurs within an installation, with musicians distanced and illuminated by local spotlights, conveying disconnection. Old TV monitors and wall projections display participant imagery, emphasizing the ephemeral and uniform appearance of the materials. The aesthetic suggests “vintage” nostalgia, with contemporary recordings feeling dated upon playback. Projected text lines from journals add layers of meaning, momentarily recontextualizing the experience. “In the Plains Of” questions foreignness, exotism, and abvoe all, mediation, blending everyday technologies with image and sound processing. It contrasts the immediate with the imagined, creating a sensory realm that blurs memory and reality.
Premiered by Ensemble ö! in Chur + Basel, 2020
under the German title“(…) Ebene eines fremden Landes”
Further showcases:
Exhibition 想象/图像/幻象Imag(in)e Fantasy at the Shanghai Chun Art Museum, hosted by the Shanghai Jiaotong University's Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, 2022
Under the version title “Mirrors of Otherlands” shown at Cadillac Shanghai Concert Hall, within the series “Digi Muse,” 2024
Parallel Prints
Live Music Project
Experimental Electronic with Graphic Score
For Yarn/Wire, New York
2020-2022
Sequences of shaded color bars, coded in software, laid the foundation of PARALLEL PRINTS. Each member of the ensemble, for each rhythm fragment, picks a graphic sequence and realizes it against a metronome, by repeating subtle dynamic shades on a single pitch. This process, conceptual in nature, lends itself to iterations across any imaginable sound-making device or instrument, provided they allow the performer to craft subtle dynamic shades on pitched percussion. Its only requirement is that each fragment be played on a single sounding body. PARALLEL PRINTS thus creates space for negotiation in the moment of its realization, as four players closely gather around a single piano, an octave of crotales, or a tiny drum pad. Yarn/Wire demonstrated an unconditional commitment to experimentation across timbres and techniques as they fluidly moved between piano-based and percussion-based sound-makers. Their patience and persistence allowed me to spend an extensive amount of time with PARALLEL PRINTS; it enabled me to spend months, if not years, with the numerous fragments we had produced together – including the months of pandemic lockdown. The conversations with my collaborators deepened, for Yarn/Wire, Dykstra, and Backer encouraged me to take the original idea’s invitation for recombination and reconfiguration seriously. Simultaneously, Backer started shooting durational video footage in rural parts of the US, which she consequently processed with software code, constructing singular artificial composites out of a variety of durational videos. Artifacts of the process characterize her work, including the stills printed on this record. Inspired by my collaborators, after recording PARALLEL PRINTS #1 with Yarn/Wire on piano, we started capturing smaller fragments on drum pads where rhythmic data was recorded without sound, and we went on recording fragments of isolated sound on different instruments, so that endless permutations could be mechanically produced. PARALLEL PRINTS #2 I thus finished by writing software code that recombines the materials while rendering audible the computational processes themselves. Clicks, drop-outs and brisk decays suggest a sonic world that could never have been played by humans, and yet the present rhythms stem directly from Yarn/Wire’s performance. For me, the core of this work is constituted by humans who interact with a piece of conceptual technology. While necessarily some of the original idea was lost, these humans – my collaborators – have given rise to surprising and unforeseen nuances that characterize what PARALLEL PRINTS has grown into.
The record is available on Editions Verde (New York).
Premiered at The Stone at The New School, New York, by Yarn/Wire (2022)
My role: composition, live performance, live electronics, recording of parts of the work, and mixdown
Other parts of the recording as well as mastering were outsourced to industry studios
Urban Sound Diary
Technical Development + Creative Research
Urban Soundscape Analysis, Archive, and Creative “Remix”
Concatinative Synthesis, Feature Extraction (Machine Learning), Web Audio API
Project Leader: Marcel Zaes Sagesser
Team Members: Xuehua FU (MSc Computer Science), Zhaorui Lio (MA Computer Music), Hao Zheng (RA), Jiayi Wen (Master student Robotics & Intelligent Manufacturing)
2024
[unpublished work, currently under review, please do not share or circulate]
On the example of Shenzhen, a large Chinese city with a high sonic density, this research aims at understanding, through a designed technological sound interaction device, the “messiness” and loudness of the city famous for its “high-tech” pioneers. Sonic technologies are a constitutional element of our contemporary urban soundscapes, which, in turn, are increasingly overtly complex assemblages. Urban Sound Diary is a browser-based app designed for mobile phones; it is a log where individuals document or record auditory experiences, focusing on the sounds they encounter in their daily environment in urban space. Instead of (or in addition to) writing down thoughts and events, a sound diary captures or describes the soundscape – the collection of sounds present in a particular space at a given time – as experienced by a single individual. Our app allows the user to record sounds from their daily environment, and to reorganize and relive their own sound diary through the sound explorer, an interactive 2d visualization of the accumulated sum of recorded sounds with creative remix functions. Using an interdisciplinary framework with sound studies, music technology, data visualization, computer science and auditory interaction design, this research project sheds light on a novel, practice-based approach to interacting with the sonic city. This approach has the potential to reveal new knowledge about how users interact with their urban environments through sound technology; and how the city itself is ultimately shaped by technological interaction with it.
#Urban Soundscape
#App-based Sound Interaction
#Participatory Audio Crowd Sourcing
First presented as a workshop at the Chinese CHI’24 Symposium, November 2024, Shenzhen
High Sections / Low Leaps
Installation + Artistic Research
Speculative Urbanism between Low and High Tech
In collaboration with Zhen Wu, Tristan Braud, Sylvia Lee
2023-2024
This work is based on urban speculations inspired by the fast developing, fast-paced Shenzhen City in the Greater Bay Area, and more precisely, on a small neighborhood in its Longgang District far North of the center, which is currently undergoing urban development. This neighborhood, changing from farmland to a highly developed urban space in only a few decades, has inspired the artist to produce an art installation that uses an idiosyncratic mixed method involving custom-made sound design, AIGC, 3D modeling and rendering, simulation of the actual city, and a spatial installation setup with CRT monitors to reflect on potential and alternative futures of this neighborhood in a far distant time. The work reflects the relationship between construction noise, mechanical low-tech sound, urban development and so-called “high-tech parks.” The artist team presents a work that lets the viewer perceive a distant future through visual and sonic technologies. The key is that cities are increasingly technological, not only at their core of how they are built, maintained and controlled as “smart cities,” but also in the sense that humans who live, work and travel in cities use screens, earbuds, loudspeakers, cars and so on to navigate, use, and access the environment. This artwork posits that, in turn, these technologies and media change the ways in which humans perceive their surroundings – and AI as a novel form of mediator of existing content plays a crucial role in shaping contemporary human perception of the world.
#High Tech Cities
#Low Tech Sound
Production team: Zhen Wu (3d modeling), Tristand Braud (3d rendering), Sylvia Lee (AIGC), Minghim Tong (sound design), Zhaorui Liu (CRT shooting), Binghuang Xu (desk research), Yang Gu (assistance)
Exhibited at SeeD Pilot Project Exhibition, Shenzhen, 2023
In Idle Mode (Noise)
Installation + Artistic Research
Data-Driven Sound
Fish Farming Noise Scapes in the Pearl River Delta
2022 - 2024
In Idle Mode (Noise) thematizes the ambiguous role of noise in large metropolitan areas. The work started with fieldwork in the Greater Bay Area, between the fishponds in the Pearl River Delta (Guangdong). With a computational method, the sound recordings have been analyzed, then handed to a group of professional singers, who interpreted the urban noisescape using their extended vocal techniques. In the exhibition gallery, from a series of hanging, outdated horn loudspeakers, the vocal snippets blend with noisy artifacts. LED screens form the backdrop to the hanging horns. In Idle Mode (Noise) presents a landscape in sound and visuals that is hybrid and ambiguous in many ways to produce a space of poetic reflection.
#Low Tech Sound
#High Tech Transcoding
15 horn loudspeakers, hanging from the ceiling, with cables and amplifiers; 15-channel generative sound, based on a fishpond recording reinterpreted by 7 singers; 3 low-resolution LED screens, 320 x 160mm; 1 low-resolution LED screen, 960 x 160mm; 4-channel generative video work, based on processed landscape panoramas
Production team: Yixuan Jin, Yujing Ma, Yaohan Zhang, Xuehua Fu, Hanyu Qu, Binghuang Xu, Zhaorui Lio (production); Binghuang Xu (desk research)
Singers: Zhang Waner, Xu Yuxuan, Zhang Han, Chen Caiying, Hou Mingrui, Xie Jiajun, Zhang Yujie
Thanks for support and inspiration: Xiao Jian, Xi Lei, Chen Dong, Jin Zhuosheng
Exhibited at Shunde Food Museum (Greater Bay Area), 2022; and at Wuhan Biennale, 2024-2025
My role: production of work, audio engineering, recording of singers in studio, mixdown, mastering, coding of generative sound algorithm
Flowing Sound
Mobile Media Installation + Artistic Research
Portable, Low-Fi Sound Sources in Shenzhen City
With a Dictionary of Moving Sound Sources
With Yaohan Zhang and Yujing Ma
2024
“Flowing Sound” takes as its starting point the idea that much of the sound in Shenzhen is dynamic and is “flowing,” that is, it is emitted from portable, moving technological sources that span a provisional sonic network across the city, thereby connecting “low tech” and “high tech” purposes and neighborhoods with one another. What emerges is an “aural economy” (Molina 2020) in which technological sound and media sources can teach us something about Shenzhen-Pingshan. The artwork is based on intense fieldwork to collect, record, and track moving media and sounds in the city. The project team then categorizes the found media and is in the process of developing and establishing a dynamic “working dictionary” of moving media and sound sources of Shenzhen. Collected sound sources are brought back into the street on a provisiaonal cart, enabling conversations with the community around sonic ephemera in the city. The results of both the dictionary and the street performance are exhibited as mobile installation with LED screens and low-fi loudspeaker devices in a gallery. “Flowing Sound” combines sound, video, performance, community-participation, background research, fieldwork, computational data analysis and visualization, and a digital archive building into a multimodal artwork and a body of artistic research.
#Aural Economy
# Urban Sound
#Portable Sound Sources
#Low-Tech Sound
First exhibited at PAM Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen (2024)
Production team: Yaohan Zhang, Yujing Ma, Xiaoyao Ma, Sihui Li, Ziye Chen
#otherbeats
Web Installation + Artistic Research
Alternative Temporalities: Playing a Participatory Rhythm Archive
2020-2022
For #otherbeats, Marcel Zaes prompted contributors across the world to send him homemade beats, ‘alternative’ metronomes and skewed pulses, recorded from their shelter-in-place locations during the pandemic with lo-fi gear. This archive of rhythm collected via social networks is displayed in a web arts project: an experimental ‘space’ that lives on a website and makes sound.
The piece is involved with different notions of time grids. Using human data for an internet-driven sound project leaves the listener with an ambiguous sonic world that oscillates between periodicity, rhythmic deviance, and what might be called a defiant networked system of arbitrary connections. #otherbeats reflects on contemporary notions of ‘technological/techno’ and ‘organic,’ of ‘grids as resistance’ and ‘otherness,’ ‘broken’ and ‘failure.’ In particular it does so by referencing to the queer, African American musical undergrounds of the 1970s via its visual language. Thereby the piece acknowledges how deeply dance music rhythms are indebted to these scenes and pays tribute to them. Zaes, by way of designing ‘alternate’ systems of networked time grids, proposes an idiosyncratic mode of thinking ‘time grids’ in digital, networked electronic music performance. #otherbeats might be neither ‘techno’ nor ‘organic,’ but in fact, both.
The piece is made exclusively with Web Audio API/JavaScript under HTML5 and uses merely filtering, convolution reverb, synthesis, compression and live mixing as its techniques. #otherbeats takes on to democratize electronic music and sound art since it replaces expensive and specialized software at elite institutions with tools as cheap, ubiquitous and accessible as the web browser.
#Participatory
#Experimental Rhythm
#Online Sound Archive
Made in 2020 as part of the larger dissertation project “Resisting the Grid – Performing Asynchrony” by Marcel Zaes at Brown University, Providence RI, USA.
Co-authored with all the contributors who have made their location audio recordings available for this project.
Co-authored with all the contributors who have made their location audio recordings available for this project.