NOWs: The Spatio Sensory Soundcheck – Jan St. Werner & The National

21 - 27 November 2019 / Nows

Jan St. Werner & The National: The Spatio Sensory Soundcheck

ambient sound installation

Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin

premiere
21 November, 6 pm

Sound becomes a spatial experience, band structures are deconstructed, a brand new sound technology celebrates its premiere in art: Last year, Jan St. Werner, part of the duo Mouse on Mars, listened to a festival sound check by the US indie rock band The National. Echoes, voices and acoustic artifacts overlapped, songs were begun and interrupted, harmonies were detuned and filtered. The picture of the perfect rock band was torn open, while at the same time the incompleteness of the action seemed to follow a method. The ambient sound installation The Spatio Sensory Soundcheck reconstructs this experience. The musician and composer disassembled a sound check recording as well as individual tracks of the current album I Am Easy to Find by The National, then electronically manipulated and reassembled them with his own elements. Mouse on Mars and The National had contributed music to each other’s most recent albums. Now Jan St. Werner goes a step further – the installation dissolves the categories of band and album and shifts the sounds in a continuous state of instability on a psychoacoustic stage: With a novel speaker system based on wave field synthesis, Jan St. Werner arranges the sounds independently of each other in the space; movements and perspectives of the listeners become part of the composition.
The installation employs a speaker system by Holoplot. The audio technology of the Berlin-based company creates fully digital 3D-beamforming of multiple audio beams based on its own wave field synthesis algorithms and real-time audio processing.

Duration: 70 minutes, beginning at

21 Nov: 6pm, 7.30pm, 9pm
22 Nov: 3pm, 4.30pm, 6pm, 7.30pm, 9pm, 10.30pm
23 Nov: 3pm, 4.30pm, 6pm, 7.30pm, 9pm, 10.30pm
24 Nov: 3pm, 4.30pm, 6pm, 7.30pm, 9pm
25 Nov: 3pm, 4.30pm, 6pm
27 Nov: 3pm, 4.30pm, 6pm

Jan Werner | Jan St. Werner & The National: The Spatio Sensory Soundcheck | © Promo