sound & radio works

This selection of recent works and project collaborations rooted in the acoustic sphere or sound tracks or installations as well as radio works. It mostly resonates around the creative challenge to present something invisible like sound in space or how to imagine the wireless space of radio and how it can presented on stage.

Big Golden Zeppelin

This performance was conceived as a staged conversation between Friedrich Liechtenstein and Jan Hendrik Brüggemeier in a format of a radio show. This co-production of the Anhaltisches Theatre Dessau and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (“Funk Project”) appeared live on local TV as well as on stage in Dessau, Germany.

“On the pile of rubble of information, speculation and desires, not finished lines of thought, stories only incompletely told and anecdotes from a post modern approach to the subject of airship travel, or put in other words: in the light of failure, accidents and fantasms … the fact still remains that these airships managed reasonably well to establish a regular global air service for a couple of years and once airborne with an absolutely stunning scenic view.

Friedrich Liechtenstein and Jan Hendrik Brüggemeier take it from there, and throughout the show they develop this fragile but grand airy castle of splendour: The Big Golden Zeppelin. But this time in order to come back the Zeppelin must be bigger than its predecessors and golden.

Amusing as well as touching and during the performance one is tempted to think from time to time: … why not?

Liechtenstein and Brüggemeier are very serious dedicated to it – no question. This radio-play, which is partly a collage and partly a documentation of a series of real events. It includes footage from a very hot summer day in the German City of Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt, editorial commentary, kitchen conversations, telephone call ins, music and original bits of recordings. All put together in a classic radio feature style. This mix of spontaneous ideas and sensible thoughts leaves us on a roller-coaster ride through the cosmos of the Big Golden Zeppelin and how Liechtenstein and Brüggemeier understand it.”

This radio play (in German) is work-in-progress and develops as the project continues to evolve:

The Big Golden Zeppelin (53’30”)
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Photo credit: video stills from the TV appearance 2010

Tags: communication, contemporary, conversation, music, performance, play, theatre, utopia

The Circle is red

An interactive installation composed of Light, Words and Sound based on the diaries and private letters of Oskar Schlemmer

On stage Oskar Schlemmer brought the painting in motion. His costume designs and space compositions taught the abstract form language of painting to jump and run. With the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer the theatre found connection with the artistic avantgarde of that time. The diarist Schlemmer is a witty and seismographic observer of a nervous epoch between the world wars aside from propaganda and party lines. He reveals his uncertainess, his doubts as modern protagonist at the breaking point of tradition and innovation.

The Circle is red is an interactive light and sound installation. The project was conceived and dramaturgically supervised by Jan Hendrik Brüggemeier. The listening environment by Ulrike Haage is based on the letters and diaries of Oskar Schlemmer. The Circle is red was produced for the Crash!Boom!Bau! Festival at the Nalepa Studios in Berlin. In this radio play the actors Leslie Malton and Gerd Wameling perform as the speaking voices. The light designer Mattjakob dal Pozzo created a versatile spatial light zone, with which he will live interact during the performance.

“The Circle is red”, quote: Oskar Schlemmer, diary Octobre 1923

Artists

composition/radio play: Ulrike Haage (D)
concept/dramaturgy: Jan H. Brüggemeier (D)
light design: Matt Jakob dal Pozzo (I/GB)
voice/radio play: Leslie Malton (US/D)
voice/radio play: Gerd Wameling (D)
sound engineer: Philipp Reitberger (D)

with the friendly support of U. Jaïna Schlemmer and C. Raman Schlemmer, Oggebbio, Italy
(The Oskar Schlemmer Theatre Estate)

photo credit: Anke Neugebauer
For promotional and educational usage only, out of copyright reasons without sound:

Tags: Bauhaus, interactive, light, music, new media, radio, scenography, stage, theatre, words

black clouds

In this installation at the Kuenstlerhaus Schloß Wiepersdorf designed Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier two ‘black clouds’ out of 420 small loudspeaker to display 6 discrete audio channels.

As a topic, clouds trigger manifold associations and are a largely known cultural phenomenon. ‘As-Sahab’, the name of the alleged media production unit of Al-Qaeda means “The Cloud” in Arabic. In the old testament it is reported, that god liked to hide his appearance behind a cloud when calling Moses on the seventh day of the creation of the earth. The cloud also serves as an analogy for radio and the more recent phenomenon of wifi and wireless culture. It describes how the reception area is spread out. As well, it leads to the first days of the radio, when people experienced radio as a god-like appearance – a disembodied voice addressed to them directly.

Radio, today, is on one hand a synonym for popular culture and mass distribution. On the other hand, it can be tagged with politics of territory and strategic warfare. It may be surprising, but to a certain degree radio is culturally and technologically rooted in war and military invention – similar to the Internet.

Along with this installation, a series of soundtracks shall follow: Love is in the Air is the initiation and first issue of the series of soundtracks dedicated to the Black Clouds installation.

Love is in the Air is composed of bits and fragments of recordings of the Lebanese radio dial during a stay in Beirut, and an audio collage of sound bits of popular love songs, that wildly and at certain points desperately spin between the right and the left channel of the audio-signal.

Love is in the Air – soundtrack, excerpt 04’30”:

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photo credit: Elina Julin

Tags: aesthetic, art, buffering, contemporary, love is in the air, music, play, sound love, soundscape, voice, waves

RADIOSAUNA .. (don’t strip your clothes, unzip your communication!)

graphics: Daniel Guischard

For the Meteor-Festival in Bergen, Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier produced the RADIOSAUNA performance together with the architect Daniel Guischard.

The RADIOSAUNA is an art installation for the public space and a common hotspot for social interaction and exchange in the city.

A mobile sauna (Finnish style) was positioned on a public square close to the harbour in Bergen, Norway. The sauna was equipped with microphones inside. The conversations inside and the atmospheric noises of the public sauna sessions were transmitted live on the local radio and online.

The RADIOSAUNA aimed to explore the similarities as well as the contradictions that unfold today in our distinction of the local and the global and the private and the public.

It combined the experience of traditional social places like the bathhouse or the sauna with the modern means of telecommunication and new media. It offered one possible notion of what a neighbourhood community action could feel like in the beginning of the 21st Century.

A playlist of audio snippets from the RADIOSAUNA sessions

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Single bits of audio from the RADIOSAUNA sessions

# Italian intro -

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# Singing -

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# Poetry round -

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# Chatting (excerpt 1) -

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# Moderation -

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# Chatting (excerpt 2) -

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# ‘my loneliness is killing me’ -

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Tags: architecture, communication, neture, new media, performance, radio, sauna