The interactive stage format “record-o-mat on stage” consists of the participatory sound installation record-o-mat and a musician.
Concert or festival visitors can generate their own sound recordings in the record-o-mat, which, fragmented and composed, become the basic material of a stage experience in which a musician enters into a live dialogue improvisation with the material. In this way, we want to create a fantastic and indeed unique musical experience in which the unexpected and surprisingly familiar can be atmospherically experienced in randomly based digital and improvisational combinatorics.
In a casual foyer or festival situation, concert-goers find the record-o-mat. Without clearly revealing the intention, everyone is casually invited to record their own spontaneous contributions in the booth. Fragmentation and mixing of the sound recordings form a live-generated composition that is (quietly) broadcast outside the record-o-mat. The participatory sound installation “record-o-mat” is self-contained and can therefore be played in advance over a longer period of time.
In a later concert setting, the collected audio material will become the basis of the composition programmed especially for the concert, which is one half of a unique duet for audio fragments and instrumental improvisation. In the improvisation, the musician refers dialogically to the current, constantly changing audio fragments. The result is an atmospheric work specific to this concert event.
Jam with Jorge da Rocha, Élénie Wagner and Catharina Boutari at Mixtur Festival in Barcelona, Spain October 2022
Performance with Dorothea Koch and Mounir Brinsi at 48h Wilhelmsburg in Hamburg in June 2022
The format “record-o-mat on stage” is new and innovative. At the interface between the analogue and the digital, the principle of mixing and dialogue between the two is central. The aim is to create an equal dialogue between two very different players: the record-o-mat as a mechanical composition tool guided by chance on the one hand and the improvising, interacting musician on the other. The acceptance of chance and the unexpected is equally challenged and encouraged by the concert-goers and the instrumentalist.
This project was partly supported by the Zukunftsstipendium Musik from the Landesmusikrat Hamburg,
funded by the Ministry for Culture and Media (BKM)