This Album features 2 acousmatic compositions.
Un Souffle, premiered at Zett Emm Festival 2022, and True Metal, which remains unpremiered as of now.

PLAY LOUD!

Un Souffle - Program Notes
(docs.google.com/document/d/16cDcOIzsNavpl-qvhwFG1mKO9O_xRiXUftfTou8uxmY/edit?usp=sharing)

Video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn6QQrfs7lU

Paul* Hermansen - Voice, composition, realisation
Bella Samuel - Voice, co-composition
Daniel Adams - Video

The Production:

Un Souffle was composed in May of 2022 as a joint project of visual artist and metal vocalist Bella Samuel (SAMBE, Moral Bombing) and composer/improviser Paul* Hermansen for Zett-Emm Festival of contemporary music in Cologne on November 5th of 2022.
In the pre-production period, Samuel and Hermansen met twice to record the primary sound material for the piece and discuss the structure of the composition.
Hermansen then worked on the piece alone for the following months.
When Zett Emm Festival requested a video to be made for the premiere of the piece, UK-based experimental filmmaker Daniel Adams was tasked.
Adams and Hermansen completed work on Un Souffle on September 25th.

The Music:

The original idea for the piece arose from a universal struggle: Getting out of bed.
Waking up from the comforting depths of one’s own mind into the alien and aggressive outside. Having to leave a loved one behind to go out alone. Going from the private and intimate into the public. The obstruction of sensuality through the mundane. Throughout the piece this movement is represented by an increase of digital artefacts in the soundworld, as well as the introduction of synthetic and bright, loud concrete material towards the end.
The sound objects used for this piece consist of the voices of Samuel and Hermansen (breathing, mouth sounds, cut-up french whispering), sounds of a bed, and increasingly microphone handling noises, traffic and church bells of the evangelische Stadtkirche in Unna.

The Film:
Taking impetus from the sound composition, this film attempts to complement the composition, without precisely illustrating it. A descriptive soundscape, beginning with waking groggily early in the morning and not wishing to leave the bed lends the start of the film a particular physicality- swirling colours (ink on film) such as those seen in states of hypnagogic vision before our eyes open give way to much lighter images: fabric (bed linen stuck to film), writing and an optical soundtrack to accompany the speech heard in the composition and a further optical soundtrack cut into fragments just as the speech we hear is fragmented, hairs pressed into painted film.

The full sequence achieved, it is then destroyed, by looping through the individual elements across 9 split screens, which then subdivide again and again (over 59,000 times!) into a moving patchwork quilt- any metaphorical meanings possible at the opening of the piece are obliterated, but the cumulative motion of the patterns gains a strange new authority. Illegible text appears once again (hammered into film using metal embossing tools), as if trying to make sense of something that is then quickly snatched away from us.

True Metal - Program Notes:
(docs.google.com/document/d/1oJGZcqtH-HGghnNoQz7FaKpOJsUFMP07_4Gu02cdATA/edit?usp=sharing)

Acousmatic music in 4 movements, ca 35 min.
Part of Dream Series 01: “Un Souffle/True Metal”

The Dream Series:
Un Souffle/True Metal is the first in the “Dream Series” of albums, which explores what Lynch coined “dream logic” as deliberately irrational choices in moment forming, virtual spaces and scene transitions. In these albums, the macrostructure forming (as in the shaping of the whole composition) should be based purely on the impressionistic, fantastical and affective dynamics of a certain dream experience rather than relying on preconceived formal notions like sonata or symphonic form, songs or concertos. The acousmatic spaces in these albums should be similarly illogical, alluding to acoustic phenomena that are close to impossible to create in the real world, with very odd reverberations and overtone characteristics.
Going from one space to another may not be linear like leaving one room and moving along a hallway to the next.
It has to be by ways of beaming, wormhole, jumpcut, disintegration, earthquake, reincarnation or similar.
The Dream Series of albums should generally be inspired by dreams the composer had.
The “very big machine dream” was received in March of 2022.

The Music:
This piece began as a material study on mechanical and generally metallic sounds.
These timbres should be analysed, categorised, and occasionally re-synthesized according to their phenomenological characteristics, i.e. pitch, timbre, ADSR characteristic and perceived size of the sound object.
So I recorded metal sounds for months and asked for the participation of a few friends to gather more sound objects in the vaguely metallic, mechanical realm.

The symbology of metal; the hard, unchanging, cold, occasionally oxidising and disintegrating should play a large role in the structural formation of the piece, along with the natural decay envelopes of the recorded metal sounds.
One symbol associated with machines is the conscious use of social manipulations that goes along with our neoliberal mechanistic reduction of social processes, in which we instrumentalize and depersonalise others, however not only that.
The machine is also all autonomous interpersonal processes, i.e. those that aren’t conscious to the ones interacting; those that develop unbeknownst to the participants of a social interaction like sympathy, attraction and their opposites.
The machine thus also represents instinct or “chemistry” as much as it represents deceit and exploitation.
Additionally, the semantic descriptors of “small”, “large”, and “big”, along with their prefixes “rather”, “very” and “slightly” should be explored in their general relativity (lack of absoluteness) and ambiguity, as well as their relations to one another throughout the four movements.




1: Very small machines

In the first movement we are at home working away on something.
An unmotivated and alienated endeavour, we are getting bored and distracting ourselves.
Interruptions in the thought process become so regular, we give up and decide to go somewhere, meet someone and build a link.

2: Rather small machines

In this movement we take our work outside of ourselves.
Work becomes a social endeavour, we make bonds, we engage.
Ideas are being tossed back and forward, progress is made linearly and at the same time a rhizomatic web is strung. Sometimes the perspective shifts into these small knots being made between us and our creative partner and we can hear the density of the web increasing and the gestures from the first part integrating into something new, then a crescendo and we’re outside with our friend and work partner as we sit and enjoy the summer evening.We realize that what is outside mirrors what is within, as the external structures repeat the contours of our inner melodies. We drift off, and suddenly find ourselves somewhere entirely different.


3: Slightly larger machines

A switch is flicked.
The sounds of a garage gate awaken us.
We are in the company of a specimen of a certain ageing male demographic characterised by their obsession with large, expensive toys, their desire for a slightly larger machine.
More precisely we venture into a “man-cave” in this piece, where the owner first treats us to a joyride in the nearby area in his Ford oldtimer, the sounds of the garage occasionally reverberating in our memory.
Things go nonlinear.
The old man glitches occasionally.
After he’s revved the engines up enough and gotten bored, we return to play a little game of pinball on an old electromechanical machine, however, as we plunge the ball for the second time, something unexpected happens and we find ourselves wormhole-transported into the inside of a very large structure.


4: The very big machine

I used the more naive sounding “big” here for slightly more fantastical implications.
The metal sounds are generally of an enveloping, reverberant nature and suggest an industrial soundscape.
Under capitalism, the military industrial complex, the exploitative workforce and organised religion make up a machine that is so large, it completely surrounds us.
Soundworlds reminiscent of worship, and war-ships, the marching of soldiers mixes with grave digging sounds and stomping pistons, gongs and guns.
The catholic Church kisses the military, Ford kisses the Dalai-Lama, all while the organist and soldiers play a terribly out of tune funeral dirge.


Sound Objects Part 1: Sarah Laube

Sound Objects Part 2: Paul* Hermansen and Luhan Saner Güney

Sound Objects Part 3: Paul* Hermansen and Kenny (last name unknown, from Dortmund, car sounds), Pinball sounds sampled from “Zaccaria Pinball”.

Sound Objects Part 4: Paul* Hermansen and Benny Mokross, Choir made from Kontakt Libraries, various samples from YouTube (Rölmö, polish brass, machine and metal sounds), military sounds from the BBC sound archive (please don’t sue me).