lowercase
lowercase is the name of a music style from the early 2000s. It is a radical form of minimalist ambient music that mostly works with sounds of extremely low volume, embedded in more or less extended stages of complete silence. Field recordings in particular , the origins of which are mostly very quiet, serve as material . The sound carriers produced can also be very quiet as a result. Bernhard Günter , Akira Rabelais , Francisco López , Richard Chartier and especially Steve Roden are considered to be important representatives .
history
The term lowercase (in German literally “Kleinschrift”) goes back to the artist and musician Steve Roden, who chose him in interviews in 1998 to characterize a certain form of music: “[...] it doesn't call for attention, it wants to be discovered. [...] It is the opposite of capital letters - loud things that attract attention. ”Roden referred to the influence of artists like Morton Feldman or John Cage .
A newsgroup founded by James Coleman in March 1999 ensured increased communication and the exchange of ideas. One of the most important lowercase labels, bremsstrahlung recordings , was also created from the list . Brake radiation released a first compilation of the new style in 2000 , a double CD with the most important representatives, the 500 copies of which sold completely within 2 weeks, a successor was released in 2002. Other major labels that publish lowercase recordings are Trente Oiseaux , 12k , Raster-Noton and the Richard Chartier-operated Line.
aesthetics
In terms of the concept, the approach was based on the one hand on the amplification of acoustic events that are normally not perceived in everyday life or are even below the human perception threshold (such as the sound of an anthill or a cell phone whose battery is draining) and, in turn, one To create music that follows a gentle, handcrafted aesthetic. In this sense, the delicate source material was processed and interwoven in a very diverse way, in an installation by Otaku Yakuza ("The Space of a Second"), for example, more than a thousand samples, each not longer than a millisecond, were combined into one piece, the one Lasted minute.
proof
- Leander Kahney: Whisper the Songs of Silence. In: Wired , May 29, 2002, accessed March 3, 2008, online
- Dan Warburton: Lowercase-Sound 2002 , in: The Wire , No. 231, May 2003, p. 73
Individual evidence
Most of the information in this article has been taken from the sources given under references; the following sources are also cited:
- ↑ "[...]; it doesn't demand attention, it must be discovered. [...] It's the opposite of capital letters - loud things which draw attention to themselves. " , Steve Roden in: STEVE RODEN - suspension and displacement , in: i / e # 12, March / April 1998
- ↑ Arielle Saiber: The Polyvalent Discourse of Electronic Music In: PMLA, Vol. 122, No. 5, 2007, pp. 1613-1625