Dreyblatt je otkačen, kontroverzan američki glazbeni minimalist - "najrokerskiji" među njima . Optužuju ga za amaterizam a on se ne brani. Sami instrumenti su moji najveći učitelji, kaže. Ono što je drugima samo sredstvo stvaranja muzike - povšine i materijalna svojstva instrumenata (drvo, metal, cijevi, zrak, odjeci) - kod njega je sama građa kompozicija. Primjerice, na Zaljubljenim propelerima žice instrumenata hipnotički repetitivno tretira kao udaraljke.
Za njegov album Animal Magnetism Jim O'Rourke kaže da spada među 4-5 najboljih albuma ikada snimljenih. Dreyblatt je i vizualni umjetnik (u performansima i instalacijama bavi se temama sjećanja i arhiviranja) te profesor medijskih umjetnosti u Njemačkoj, gdje živi od 1984..
Njegova web stranica.
Arnold Dreyblatt & The Orchestra of Excited Strings-Propellers In Love,LP,1986,Germany/USA
Arnold Dreyblatt is one of the most misunderstood contemporary composers on the scene. The complaint is that his music is amateurish, whatever that means. Funny thing is, he admits this freely, and that technique and advanced conceptions of harmonics are not for him. His explanation is that "the instruments themselves are my greatest teachers." Dreyblatt sees the means of making music as the stuff from which compositions are made: surfaces and materials such as wood, brass, pipe, air, reverberation, etc. As evidenced by the two works here, one can hear two things at work -- besides strings and percussion -- the influences of Terry Riley and Steve Reich from their early years and an ambition to "get to the big sound." Here, what is illustrated over two compositions, "Propellers in Love" and "High Life," is a willingness to incorporate the elemental "modes" for listening: rhythmic structure, overtonal structure, timbral richness, etc, and shift them into a bigger more inclusive way of both hearing and making music. Here, all strings are played as percussion instruments, repetitively, even hypnotically. They've all been altered in some way and need to be recorded very closely in order to capture both the acoustic resonances of the instruments that the combination of those resonances in a room or recording space. While this might sound very academic, it's anything but; in fact, given the strange sonorities and polytonalism of Dreyblatt's music, it's actually a lot of fun, and not in an egghead way. This is especially true of "High Life." The track is a duet between Dreyblatt playing an electric lap steel guitar and Paul Panhuysen on a prepared electric bass. It's a curiously lovely study of overtone structures and timbres. In just intonation, there are no half steps and everything has a drone-like quality. La Monte Young brought this to the States with him, and it's been used ever since. Here, two tonally different instruments, tuned three steps apart, are producing various timbres as they shift into and out of the playing space, as the players are exerting or relaxing tensions. Between them, a third timbre is produced creating another series of overtones. It's monotonous, but it's far from boring. Dreyblatt has taught us much abut the uses of instruments, and based on this work alone he is far from the amateur others make him to be. Truly beautiful, touching pieces.- allmusic.com
"Dreyblatt's ensemble, consisting of altered, adapted, and prepared instruments are in just intonation and play drones or repeated tones, setting up heady resonances with a contiually changing and complex matrix of overtones. By adding drums and other percussion, and by writing fast, sometimes furious tempos, Dreyblatt avoids the dreamy and sometimes stultifying effect that is a part of so much drone music. The entire six-part title track is lively and vibrant. High Life is similar in spirit to La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier, with its nonstop drone and lavish array of overtones to inspect and exult in." - Option
"Arnold Dreyblatt's ensemble performed a bright, colorful work for winds, strings, guitars, cimbalom... an essentially minimalist impulse and a spirit that's multi-cultural: its heavy drum beat and the freewheeling, almost manic quality of its string and wind writing made parts of the work seem a stew of primitive, ritual musics, both Asian and African.' -The New York Times
Turntable History (2011)
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Turntable History is a recording of a 40 minute multi-channel sound composition which was concieved as part of an audio-visual installation installed in the circular vaulted brick space of a historical water container in Berlin in 2009. The original sound content is derived from recordings made by Arnold Dreyblatt of a Magnetic Resonance Imagining Scanner ("Siemens Magnetom Symphony Maestro Class") in a radiological practice in Berlin. Dreyblatt was fortunate to gain rare permission to record this device in operation without patients being involved. A technician from Siemens manned the machine especially for these recordings, searching for software settings related to their resulting sonic output rather for scanning particular body areas. Dreyblatt treated the device as a giant "Tesla coil", in which the alignment and resonances of a powerful magnetic field is gradually altered by rotating radio frequencies. Dreyblatt analysed and deconstructed the original recordings and grouped the audio segments by pitch, rhythm and density. The resulting five-channel composition of harmonically resonating, pulsating signals, sounded within this voluminous reflective space (with long delay times) is wonderfully captured in this recording.
"Arnold Dreyblatt is an American composer who has studied with La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier. He is a member of the German Academy Of Art. He has released work on labels such as Table Of The Elements, Canteloupe, Tzadik, Hat Art and Dexter's Cigar. 'Turntable History' is a recording of a 40 minute multi-channel sound composition which was concieved as part of an audio-visual installation installed in the circular vaulted brick space of a historical water container in Berlin in 2009. The original sound content is derived from recordings made by Arnold Dreyblatt of a Magnetic Resonance Imagining Scanner ("Siemens Magnetom Symphony Maestro Class") in a radiological practice in Berlin. Dreyblatt was fortunate to gain rare permission to record this device in operation without patients being involved. A technician from Siemens manned the machine especially for these recordings, searching for software settings related to their resulting sonic output rather for scanning particular body areas. Dreyblatt treated the device as a giant "Tesla coil", in which the alignment and resonances of a powerful magnetic field is gradually altered by rotating radio frequencies. Dreyblatt analysed and deconstructed the original recordings and grouped the audio segments by pitch, rhythm and density. The resulting five-channel composition of harmonically resonating, pulsating signals, sounded within this voluminous reflective space (with long delay times) is wonderfully captured in this recording." - boomkat
Conlon Nancarrow transformed the player piano into high art. Alvin Lucier showed us the subtleties of slow sweep oscillators. Now, Arnold Dreyblatt renders poetry from an MRI machine and a vaulted water cistern. Turntable History is a document of icy beauty in which pitch, space and machine function in touching symbiosis.
In a way, the album’s title is misleading, as the turntable is a silent partner. In the 2009 installation of the same name, a “media turntable” (quotations from Dreyblatt’s website) projected images in and around the large circular space for which the project was conceived. The music was played over five strategically placed loud speakers, an effect that I imagine was somewhat reminiscent of Varese’s “Poème électronique,” written for the Philips Pavillion at the 1958 Worlds Fair. Beyond that, the parallel breaks down. According to the indispensible but scanty liner notes, Dreyblatt was given special permission to record the MRI’s unique language without a human subject, later grouping the results by sonic property to form the 40-minute composition.
As is the case with “Poème électronique,” there is obviously no way for a two-channel system to capture the full spatial impact of Dreyblatt’s sound sculpture. What is surprising, though, is just how much of a sense of space and perspective this recording affords. From the distant, pulsed trudge that opens the work, seeming to approach from ahead and to the right, the echoing timbres create an enthralling illusion of three dimensions. Echo is never overbearing, however, and in an astonishing feat of mixing prowess, each sound is layered to allow enough transparency and depth to fill any listening environment. Some sounds even seem to emanate from behind, hinting at the grandeur of the water container’s acoustics.
The mechanical sounds themselves are also responsible for the continuous illusion of perspective. As with an ensemble recording, such as 1995’s Animal Magnetism, the steady pulses traditionally associated with minimalism vie with unexpected tonal and rhythmic juxtapositions. Here, as with Lucier’s oscillators, a precision of rhythm and microtone is achieved far beyond the ability of even the finest musician to emulate, filling the soundstage with motions of their own. That opening pulse, the work’s heartbeat, creates a sense against which everything else seems somehow transient. We are also treated to similarly complex shifts in timbre. Listen to the first actual pitch of the piece, how it pulses and throbs unpredictably and how its timbre brightens. These are the relationships that propel Turntable History forward. Beats come forth from within each pitch and from the way the pitches interact, forming exquisitely intricate webs of polyrhythm that compliment the constantly morphing halos of morphing overtones. Consider one moment: at about 3:30 into the work, where a sudden shift in beat and tonality sweeps away everything that preceded it. There are too many such instances to catalog.
When we reach the concluding single pitch, and as the mechanized heartbeat fades, another sense of circularity is achieved, which was prefigured by the minute repetitions that form the music’s fabric. Even divorced from its visual elements, this is an essential addition to Dreyblatt’s all-too-small discography. It presents a facet of his art that has never been represented on disc with such clarity and fidelity.- Marc Medwin
Like that of many minimalist composers, Dreyblatt’s music is by and large quite accessible to the post-techno, post-world music, post-post-rock music listener. Hell, if you’ve ever listened to The Velvet Underground and Nico, you’ll be all right in Dreyblatt’s sound world. The currently Berlin-based sound artist and second-wave minimalist composer’s previous albums and compositions have been characterized by majestic long strings ringing luxuriantly in fabled New York settings. His most famous compositions, such as Nodal Excitation, have consisted of a percussive, drumming “excitement” of open unwound piano wire stretched across the resonating chamber of a double bass. His newest release, however, is less “Venus in Furs” than Metal Machine Music. It is an extreme timbral departure — there are no excited strings here, there is no post-rock repetition of minimalist cells. What does unite Turntable History with Dreyblatt’s previous work and with the groundbreaking sound art of his teacher, Alvin Lucier, of “I am sitting in a room” fame, is its site-specific richness of space — this is a 40-minute recording of a 2009 art installation in Berlin, and it sounds like it was an incredible experience. On Turntable History, the album, the machine noise of everyday life is made surprisingly evocative, but this time the overtones that emerge come in no small part from my imagination of sounds whose source I cannot pinpoint.
The sound for this installation was composed out of recordings Dreyblatt made of a tweaked MRI machine. Dreyblatt was, according to the record label, “fortunate to gain rare permission to record this device in operation without patients being involved,” and he enlisted a technician to tweak the machine to make interesting sounds, rather than to scan a body. Dreyblatt then chopped up the recordings and “grouped the audio segments by pitch, rhythm, and density.” These sounds were then blasted out of five speakers into a circular brick cistern in Berlin. The record that Important has released is the sound of the altered MRI recordings careening through the space. For tones from such a prosaic mechanical source, the sound is remarkably rich, and the feeling of echoes coming unpredictably from all directions is admirably reproduced on the stereo cd. The flat tones are given pathos and subtlety through their degraded reproduction as echoes. The machine’s workmanlike whirring and buzzes becomes at times an elemental groan, a flurry of ticks, or a low-pitched, far-away whistle that I swear is the same one that forms the real hook of the chorus to Wacka Flocka Flame’s hit “No Hands.”
The turntable of the album’s title is not the all-night party machine of the postmodern sonic bricoleur, or the indeterminate neo-dada instrument of John Cage’s compositions, but instead a “media turntable” that slowly rotated in the center of Dreyblatt’s installation, projecting “archival documentation concerning the history of the site” onto the walls (and art-goers), the images moving at different rates, many scrolling backwards at the same rate that the turntable turns, creating the illusion that the text is standing still. What comes to mind in viewing the video is the lighthouse, the impassive sentinel rotating its light: not an eye or a beacon, but a piece of text broadcast out to sea, describing the border between land and water.
The visual references in Dreyblatt’s media installation to the lighthouse, and the site-specific nature of the recording’s echoes, suggest that we should travel to the beacon’s source in order to fully experience the piece. Perhaps. But the monumental blasts that emerge out of the album’s whirs and clicks also seem to reference the foghorn: the diffuse, almost subliminal noise that, for me as a San Franciscan, can weave ghostlike from out of the fog through the city streets into my dreams, even when my eyes are closed. (You can close your eyelids to block out the lighthouse, but you have no earlids to block out the foghorn.) Phenomenologically, the foghorn is almost a pure sound phenomenon, with no physical substance or origin to tie it down, not even in our imaginations. It is a sound with great cultural resonance, one we can talk about as art or part of a landscape, but if most people are like me, I doubt they can describe what a foghorn looks like, how the sound is actually produced, or even point to where it comes from when you hear it. It is a purely abstract emanation from nowhere that has its primary existence in our imaginations. The MRI machine seeks to probe this interior, and Dreyblatt gives us an experience not just of what it is like to be inside an MRI machine, but to be inside one’s head inside an MRI machine that is scanning said head. The freewheeling texts and mysterious noise music careening inside the skull-shaped space of the cistern create a chaotic jumble of shifting perspectives and throbbing echoes. Through this album, we experience a wireless imagination of FT Marinetti’s telegraphic lyricism, the futurist dream: our machines singing to us, even if this can only happen within the bone cisterns of our minds. - Ian Latta
The sound for this installation was composed out of recordings Dreyblatt made of a tweaked MRI machine. Dreyblatt was, according to the record label, “fortunate to gain rare permission to record this device in operation without patients being involved,” and he enlisted a technician to tweak the machine to make interesting sounds, rather than to scan a body. Dreyblatt then chopped up the recordings and “grouped the audio segments by pitch, rhythm, and density.” These sounds were then blasted out of five speakers into a circular brick cistern in Berlin. The record that Important has released is the sound of the altered MRI recordings careening through the space. For tones from such a prosaic mechanical source, the sound is remarkably rich, and the feeling of echoes coming unpredictably from all directions is admirably reproduced on the stereo cd. The flat tones are given pathos and subtlety through their degraded reproduction as echoes. The machine’s workmanlike whirring and buzzes becomes at times an elemental groan, a flurry of ticks, or a low-pitched, far-away whistle that I swear is the same one that forms the real hook of the chorus to Wacka Flocka Flame’s hit “No Hands.”
The turntable of the album’s title is not the all-night party machine of the postmodern sonic bricoleur, or the indeterminate neo-dada instrument of John Cage’s compositions, but instead a “media turntable” that slowly rotated in the center of Dreyblatt’s installation, projecting “archival documentation concerning the history of the site” onto the walls (and art-goers), the images moving at different rates, many scrolling backwards at the same rate that the turntable turns, creating the illusion that the text is standing still. What comes to mind in viewing the video is the lighthouse, the impassive sentinel rotating its light: not an eye or a beacon, but a piece of text broadcast out to sea, describing the border between land and water.
The visual references in Dreyblatt’s media installation to the lighthouse, and the site-specific nature of the recording’s echoes, suggest that we should travel to the beacon’s source in order to fully experience the piece. Perhaps. But the monumental blasts that emerge out of the album’s whirs and clicks also seem to reference the foghorn: the diffuse, almost subliminal noise that, for me as a San Franciscan, can weave ghostlike from out of the fog through the city streets into my dreams, even when my eyes are closed. (You can close your eyelids to block out the lighthouse, but you have no earlids to block out the foghorn.) Phenomenologically, the foghorn is almost a pure sound phenomenon, with no physical substance or origin to tie it down, not even in our imaginations. It is a sound with great cultural resonance, one we can talk about as art or part of a landscape, but if most people are like me, I doubt they can describe what a foghorn looks like, how the sound is actually produced, or even point to where it comes from when you hear it. It is a purely abstract emanation from nowhere that has its primary existence in our imaginations. The MRI machine seeks to probe this interior, and Dreyblatt gives us an experience not just of what it is like to be inside an MRI machine, but to be inside one’s head inside an MRI machine that is scanning said head. The freewheeling texts and mysterious noise music careening inside the skull-shaped space of the cistern create a chaotic jumble of shifting perspectives and throbbing echoes. Through this album, we experience a wireless imagination of FT Marinetti’s telegraphic lyricism, the futurist dream: our machines singing to us, even if this can only happen within the bone cisterns of our minds. - Ian Latta
Live At Federal Hall National Memorial (1981)
Arnold Dreyblatt is a minimalist who never forgot that music is still the human mating call. Anyone who has experienced the composer's recordings with his marvelously-dubbed Orchestra of Excited Strings knows how madly Dreyblatt's pieces swing. They flaunt time as precisely as a Swiss watch. Indeed, music like this can put you in the mind of the whirring cogs and pulleys of some small mechanized device. Everything's moving, twitching about, a bunch of individual sounds racheting up and down in a modulated relationship to all the other individual sounds. This animated playfulness exudes a real charm. Springy rhythms dance with each other, as clipped percussion and purposefully bowed strings generate delightful harmonic chatter.- Tabel of the Elements
This live CD celebrates the 25th anniversary of Dreyblatt's historic concert at Federal Hall in New York (where George Washington was inaugurated as President). Utilizing the natural resonances of the structure''s spectacular dome, Dreyblatt and co. romp through seven outstanding pieces for just-intoned double basses, piano, hurdy gurdy and pipe organ, emphasizing dynamics and sonorities to stunning acoustical effect.
"A composer of stature, Dreyblatt has charted his own unique course in modern classical music. Often characterized as the most rock-oriented of American minimalists, his work with the Orchestra of Excited Strings does justice to the moniker.... -Dusted
"Transcendental and ecstatic." - Downtown Music Gallery
‘Live at Federal Hall National Memorial 1981’ is a recording of Arnold Dreyblatt and his beautifully named Orchestra of Excited Strings, taken from 1981. This cd release celebrates the 25th anniversary of the piece, and has already garnered huge amounts of praise from the knowledgeable few in the experimental music scene. Tzadik-followers Downtown Music Gallery in central NYC have already commented on the release being ‘Transcendental and ecstatic’, and who am I to disagree? The 50 minute live album revolves around the sound of double bass, piano, hurdy gurdy and organ all resonating wildly in the domed Federal Hall National Memorial. The sound is quite belittling, and the pieces clearly came into their own in this peculiar space – ‘Live at Federal Hall…’ is another crucial part of the American avant garde and another great addition to the Table of the Elements catalogue - boomkat
Point Source / Lapse
As one of the most engaging of the second generation of New York minimal composers, Arnold Dreyblatt has developed a distinctive-And delightfully accessible-approach to composition and performance. Employing modified and invented instruments and a unique tuning system, his music is a vigorously rhythmic and richly textured romp through the natural overtone series. These two outstanding pieces for just-intoned electric guitar, bass violin, cimbalom, percussion and brass emphasize dynamics and sonorities, to stunning acoustical effect.' - Second Layer
Who's Who in Central & East Europe - A Journey in the Text (2010)
"This is the long awaited release of one of Dreyblatt's most personal and major extended works.
Created in 1991, it combined documentary photographs, films, texts and sound materials selected from archives and private collections with original music and was a landmark in multimedia opera production, touring a dozen cities and winning the Philip Morris Art Prize in 1992." - Tzadik, 2010
Created in 1991, it combined documentary photographs, films, texts and sound materials selected from archives and private collections with original music and was a landmark in multimedia opera production, touring a dozen cities and winning the Philip Morris Art Prize in 1992." - Tzadik, 2010
Full Text / LibrettoWith support from the Irish Arts Council in 2004, I was commissioned by the Crash Ensemble, Dublin to compose a new work. During a series of intense working visits over a one and half year period, members the ensemble was introduced to the Dreyblatt tuning system. The Crash Ensemble is the only group outside of my own previous ensembles which has learned to perform in my intonation of 21 unequal tones based on the first eleven partials of the harmonic series and their multiples. The resulting work, "Resonant Relations" was composed for flutes (wooden and metal), trombone, violin, viola, cello, contrabass, harpsichord, and percussion (timpanies, snare and bass drum, metal pieces).
The work was first performed at the Sugar Club in Dublin on 27 October 2005 in a program co-curated with Crash artistic director Donnacha Dennehy which included performances of compositions by my two composition teachers La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier.
The Adding Machine (2002)
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Adding to the already exciting and wonderfully varied world of sound and wonder previously released by Arnold Dreyblatt is Bang on a Can's label, Cantaloupe. Dreyblatt was responsible for "The Escalator," one of the finest moments on the Bang on a Can Allstars' Cantaloupe launching pad album, Renegade Heaven. His association with them goes back into the early '90s. For those unfamiliar, Dreyblatt uses a combination of standard instruments as well as original creations and radically transformed ones to play an overtonal tuning system based on just intonation with 20 notes per octave -- as opposed to the eight we standard Westerners use. His instruments are designed to utilize the "hot overtones" he finds in his system, that are illuminated best with strings. He uses a reconfigured cimbalom that is actually a pre-war, Chinese children's piano, which is played horizontally with hammers. One of his electric guitars has built-in magnetic driver-sustainers for each string, and for both instruments, new frets have been added in the just intonation scale. His bass has been restrung with unwound steel wire and is played by being beaten and struck with a bass bow. There are other more conventional instruments such as violin, cello, double bass, hurdy-gurdy, and percussion. All of the instruments -- save for percussion -- perform in the 20-note-per-octave system. What does it sound like? Like a shimmering, hyperkinetic orgy of string music, dynamically arranged for maximum penetration of the cerebral cortex's pleasure center. Dreyblatt, unlike his contemporaries Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, and others, doesn't need to knock the listener down with his music; it naturally establishes ostinato rhythmic patterns, textural balances, and tonal symmetry. The title track, with its snare drum underlining the cimbalom and cello as the other strings pulse and vibrate, is a case in point. Elsewhere, in the gargantuan "Meantime," percussion creates a type of Morse code that is very gradually extrapolated upon by the stringed instruments even as new rhythmic patterns appear in the middle of established ones. Certainly it is tempting to merely label this music minimalism, but to do so would be erroneous because so much happens in the midst of pulse patterns and pedal, points in which harmonics are literally being created every moment as it unfolds over 14 minutes with certain instruments taking center stage for a few moments and then fading as others are asserted into the mix. The conclusion is dramatic and profound, but not without humor and great beauty. This is a mysterious music that is at once enchanting, engaging, and accessible. This is a brilliant piece of work by a composer who, though he's been around a time or three, is just hitting his stride. - allmusic.com
Parts of this music were composed and rehearsed with support by an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (1997-98), New York and a residency at the Center for the Arts, Massachussetts Institute of Technology (2000-2001), Cambridge. This music was premiered live at Tonic, New York City, January 18 & 19, 2001, in concerts produced by David Weinstein.
"Armed with a small platoon of stringed instruments, percussion and a hurdy-gurdy, composer Arnold Dreyblatt and his ensemble have created what can best be described as an "organic techno" album-that is, techno performed by humans rather than programmed by them, which brings with it inevitable (though slight) human inconsistencies in execution. Plucked and bowed strings of every sort-guitar, cello, bass and zither among them-are set atop dirty fatback drumming, like Led Zeppelin's John Bonham leading a marching band. Short musical ideas are repeated over harmonic pedal-points, changing and evolving frequently enough to avoid a feeling of stasis.
The illusion of music moving through three-dimensional space- an effect that great loopers like Plastikman and DJ Shadow create through the clever juxtaposition of static and dynamic musical elements-is not in evidence here. Instead, the delight in Dreyblatt's music comes from the details, the continuously revived freshness in the repeated gestures, and the warm pulse that comes from music actually played by bows, sticks and fingers.
While it's unlikely that Dreyblatt's album will spawn a revolution in electronica, his low-tech techno approach may inspire a new strain of minimalism within classical music, one that draws upon contemporary electronica for inspiration but remains acoustic in execution. Overall, The Adding Machine suffers from a lack of variation among the cuts, but when it all comes together, as in the syncopated, tribal Meantime, the groove is irresistible."- Ben Finane NY
Download Additional Reviews
Escalator (2000)
In 1986-87 I began working on a "digital dynamic processing system" for a commission at Ars Electronicain Linz in 1987 and further developed this in a residency at STEIM in Amsterdam in 1989. This system was triggered with recorded machine tracks and interacts with acoustic instruments. Its basis are recordings of the rhythms produced by a number of malfunctioning escalators on the Blvd. Ansbach in Brussels which I made in 1987. In this version of Escalator, I notated repetitive rhythmic patterns found in these recordings and scored them for cimbalom, prepared electric guitar and cello, later adding layers of percussion, saxophone and prepared "excited strings" bass in collaboration with the musicians
This performance of Escalator for the Bang in a Can All-Stars was the first occasion where my music has been played by an ensemble other than my own. The piece had its beginnings in a duet performance piece with percussionist Pierre Berthet in Belgium in 1988, and it has been performed in various transformations by The Orchestra of Excited Strings over the years. - Arnold Dreyblatt
"Arnold Dreyblatt's Escalator is based on recordings of malfunctioning escalators. The band would hammer away on one note while the drums pounded with Beefheartian rhythms. Tense harmonies abruptly gave way to gentler sections while still maintaining typical Dreyblatt rhythms. Escalator sounded less like a malfunctioning escalators than an insanely mad town orchestra. Bang On A Can should commission more works by New York City microtonalists like Branca and Dreyblatt." - Juxtaposition Ezine
The Sound of One String (1998)
"Live and previously unreleased recordings: 1979-1991, including classic works like Nodal Excitation, Propellers in Love, etc. Dreyblatt's music focuses on the harmonic possibilities of stringed music and heightened sound awareness and this is an important and supremely pleasurable sound document of his works. Includes music for various combinations of prepared double bass, miniature princess pianoforte, hurdy gurdy, pipe organ, French horn, trombone, violin, percussion, electric guitars, electronics, cimbalom, tuba, voice, etc.
Arnold Dreyblatt is a major contributor to American minimalism; yet his efforts to date, like those of fellow composers Rhys Chatham and Tony Conrad, have been conspicuously underdocumented. The tracks compiled on The Sound Of One String range from early solo performances to digital studio recordings of Dreyblatt's full ensemble; together these comprise the first comprehensive retrospective of a remarkable, twenty-year career." - Table of the Elements"
The Sound of One String may be (Dreyblatt's) best album. It's a collection of recordings from the late 70's to the early 90's, some solo, some featuring his group, The Orchestra of Excited Strings. Dreyblatt's music is primarily concerned with the manipulation of various string instruments to produce ghost-like overtones and harmonics. The wide variety of instrumentation here (everything from e-bowed guitars to hurdy-gurdys to a conventional string ensemble) brilliantly displays the range and musicality of Dreyblatt's sound experiments. - David Licht
"An expat composer, Dreyblatt has studied and played with Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, and LaMonte Young. His music is precise, gorgeous, and rich, based on the ringing, overlapping tones of droning, "excited" strings and other instruments. In his 19 years of making minimalist/maximalist music, Dreyblatt has only released three full-length works, each of which combines the visceral wallop of primitive rock & roll with the ethereal, glistening, timbral qualities of the finest orchestral string section. Fans of Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, and the Deep Listening Band will be pleasantly excited by this collection of experiments, live recordings, and unreleased shorter works that include horns, percussion, a variety of prepared string instruments, and hurdy-gurdy put to exquisite, levitating use". - Mike McGonigal
Arnold Dreyblatt is a major contributor to American minimalism; yet his efforts to date, like those of fellow composers Rhys Chatham and Tony Conrad, have been conspicuously underdocumented. The tracks compiled on The Sound Of One String range from early solo performances to digital studio recordings of Dreyblatt's full ensemble; together these comprise the first comprehensive retrospective of a remarkable, twenty-year career." - Table of the Elements"
The Sound of One String may be (Dreyblatt's) best album. It's a collection of recordings from the late 70's to the early 90's, some solo, some featuring his group, The Orchestra of Excited Strings. Dreyblatt's music is primarily concerned with the manipulation of various string instruments to produce ghost-like overtones and harmonics. The wide variety of instrumentation here (everything from e-bowed guitars to hurdy-gurdys to a conventional string ensemble) brilliantly displays the range and musicality of Dreyblatt's sound experiments. - David Licht
"An expat composer, Dreyblatt has studied and played with Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, and LaMonte Young. His music is precise, gorgeous, and rich, based on the ringing, overlapping tones of droning, "excited" strings and other instruments. In his 19 years of making minimalist/maximalist music, Dreyblatt has only released three full-length works, each of which combines the visceral wallop of primitive rock & roll with the ethereal, glistening, timbral qualities of the finest orchestral string section. Fans of Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, and the Deep Listening Band will be pleasantly excited by this collection of experiments, live recordings, and unreleased shorter works that include horns, percussion, a variety of prepared string instruments, and hurdy-gurdy put to exquisite, levitating use". - Mike McGonigal
Nodal Excitation (1982)
Originally released in 1982 on the India Navigation label, this essential avant-garde minimalist record was salvaged from obscurity by Jim O'Rourke, who issued the first-ever CD version on his Dexter's Cigar label in 1998. Arnold Dreyblatt came out of the same stream of American minimalism that spawned the groundbreaking work of Steve Reich, La Monte Young, and Philip Glass. While Dreyblatt's work was equally influential as his peers in the minimalist movement, his name remained an obscure footnote in the genre up until the '90s, when his work was given a higher degree of exposure due to an extraordinary album released on John Zorn's Tzadik label. The 1996 album entitled Animal Magnetism is a logical progression on the work presented here, where repetition and rhythm are explored to fastidious degrees. Nodal Excitation could be said to be a quintessential study in minimalism with a small ensemble performing on Dreyblatt's modified string instruments, which are hammered in art-brut fashion, resulting in a deep and complex array of overtones and harmonics. Nodal Excitation is a vital recording, essential to listeners with both passing and in-depth interests in minimalist and avant-garde music. The eight untitled tracks form a deeply hypnotic suite over a total length of 38 minutes and result in a piece that is overall as strong as his other recorded works, such as The Sound of One String and Animal Magnetism.
Nodal Excitation is a mesmerising drone composition in six movements with a sound far larger than the instruments with which it was made. Recorded in 1981, it totally rocks. Never mind that the music is consistently melodic and absolutely beautiful. And while not much happens on the small scale of listening, if you let yourself just listen to the whole thing, you'll feel at least as swept away as you were by Minor Threat's cover of '12XU'... ...This music will rattle yor skull and shake the worms out of your apples. It's pretty good. - Mike McDonigal, New York Press
Nodal Excitation is a reissue of a key minimalist masterwork. Dreyblatt's documentation in the past has been slim, with albums on Hat Art, Tzadik and (shortly) Table of the Elements. This album features a 39 minute performance by Arnold's group known as The Orchestra of Excited Strings, recorded in 1981/82 "Dreyblatt only had one record Nodal Excitation (on the mostly post-AACM jazz label India Navigation), before he packed and moved to Berlin, were he concentrated on other activities, making only 2 more records over the next 10 years. But for those who caught the action, Arnold was the man. He was more rock than any of the other minimalists combined, and he was also the only one to really tap into that massive proto-minimal sound that Conrad had squelched out of his tin-contact mic violin in the early 60s. Indeed, in the early 70s, after being in school in Buffalo, where Conrad taught, Dreyblatt moved into Manhattan to work for LaMonte Young, where he witnessed first hand, and listened first-ear to those legendary recordings of the Theatre of Eternal Music. He got interested in long string sounds, and bought a bass that he wired with piano wire. By hitting the strings instead of bowing them, Dreyblatt was able to get those ringing overtones, but he also had added something new: pure rhythm...So what you have here is Dreyblatt's freshman record, a slice of minimal history that is as potent now, if not more, as it was then. It was a lighthouse that was aiming the wrong way when the tugboat came by, but now it's shining right in your face." - Drag City Press Release
'Sounding almost like dulcimers, the bowed basses begin compositions with insistent, percussive rhythms, before the rest of the ensemble gradually enters, creating dense walls of organ and hurdy-gurdy drone. The hammered 'excited strings' speed up and slow down, churning out ringing passages that shift from melodic to dissonant and back. - Badaboom Gramophone
"Reissue of a key minimalist masterwork. Dreyblatt's documentation in the past has been slim, with albums on Hat Art, Tzadik and (shortly) Table of the Elements. This album features a 39 minute performance by Arnold's group known as The Orchestra of Excited Strings, recorded in 1981/82 Dreyblatt, Michael Hauenstein (bass violas with Excited Strings), Peter Phillips (Midget Upright Pianoforte), Kraig Hill (Portable Pipe Organ) & Greg Lewis (Hurdy Gurdy). "Dreyblatt only had one record Nodal Excitation (on the mostly post-AACM jazz label India Navigation), before he packed and moved to Berlin, were he concentrated on other activities, making only 2 more records over the next 10 years. But for those who caught the action, Arnold was the man. He was more rock than any of the other minimalists combined, and he was also the only one to really tap into that massive proto-minimal sound that Conrad had squelched out of his tin-contact mic violin in the early 60s. Indeed, in the early 70s, after being in school in Buffalo, where Conrad taught, Dreyblatt moved into Manhattan to work for LaMonte Young, where he witnessed first hand, and listened first-ear to those legendary recordings of the Theatre of Eternal Music. He got interest in long string sounds, and bought a bass that he wired with piano wire. By hitting the strings instead of bowing them, Dreyblatt was able to get those ringing overtones, but he also had added something new: pure rhythm...So what you have here is Dreyblatt's freshman record, a slice of minimal history that is as potent now, if not more, as it was then. It was a lighthouse that was aiming the wrong way when the tugboat came by, but now it's shining right in your face." - Bob Simons
| 1 | feat. Larry Harlow | 5:35 | ||
| 2 | feat. Larry Harlow | 2:24 | ||
| 3 | feat. Larry Harlow | 1:58 | ||
| 4 | feat. Larry Harlow | 7:01 | ||
| 5 | feat. Larry Harlow | 7:06 | ||
| 6 | feat. Larry Harlow | 8:26 | ||
| 7 | feat. Larry Harlow | 3:01 | ||
| 8 |
Animal Magnetism (1995)
"While I really like everything of Arnold's, especially the more "heroic" parts of Nodal Excitations and Propellors in Love, this is the record that really steps out as the first genuinely new sound in maybe 10 years. It's as if the Dirty Dozen Brass band got a hold of some of Arnold's records and decided to give it a go. I cannot overstate how unbelievably brilliant this record is. When played loud, I firmly stand by my declaration that it is one of the 4 or so best records ever made". - Jim O'Rourke
"The bright, punchy staccato nature of Dreyblatt's compositons allude to some of Michael Nyman's early ensemble works, a character further emphasized by the dynamic constraints of the instrumentation... ...Dreyblatt wants you to listen through the beats in order to connect with the overtone structures and resonant sound features bouncing off the rhythmic surfaces... I've certainly grown to love it.' - David Illic, The Wire Magazine Soundcheck Winner October, 1995
"This particular release from 1995 is initially striking because of its pure energy. I guarantee that it's one of the few releases you'll find featuring "classical" instruments which encourages you to "listen at maximum volume!" Dreyblatt also uses a wider palette than most Minimalists, as his Orchestra of Excited Strings actually consists of strings, horns, percussion, and just-intonation guitar. Yet he holds the same concern with microtonal structure that Conrad does, just through more propulsive music. Some people back in the Seventies used to talk about how the music of Steve Reich and Phillip Glass was somehow related to "rock," but those charlatans don't have anything on Arnold Dreyblatt. - Pataphysics Research Journal
Arnold Dreyblatt's 1995 Tzadik release, Animal Magnetism, includes many juxtaposed sections of repeating, skip-like structures that come off in a simple, lovely way. It is entirely likable with a lilting, pots-and-pans schizophrenia that insists we hear what normally doesn't work, what normally isn't called art. Embedded with quirk-pop elements, the pieces resemble deconstructed dance tunes reflected in a room full of mirrors. Slightly carnival moments, tweaked ska counter rhythms, percussive foregrounds overlying slide effects backgrounds, barely-contained marching band funk -- all these are part of Dreyblatt's musical world. - allmusic.com
"While I really like everything of Arnold's, especially the more "heroic" parts of Nodal Excitations and Propellors in Love, this is the record that really steps out as the first genuinely new sound in maybe 10 years. It's as if the Dirty Dozen Brass band got a hold of some of Arnold's records and decided to give it a go. I cannot overstate how unbelievably brilliant this record is. When played loud, I firmly stand by my declaration that it is one of the 4 or so best records ever made". - Jim O'Rourke
"The bright, punchy staccato nature of Dreyblatt's compositons allude to some of Michael Nyman's early ensemble works, a character further emphasized by the dynamic constraints of the instrumentation... ...Dreyblatt wants you to listen through the beats in order to connect with the overtone structures and resonant sound features bouncing off the rhythmic surfaces... I've certainly grown to love it.' - David Illic, The Wire Magazine Soundcheck Winner October, 1995
"This particular release from 1995 is initially striking because of its pure energy. I guarantee that it's one of the few releases you'll find featuring "classical" instruments which encourages you to "listen at maximum volume!" Dreyblatt also uses a wider palette than most Minimalists, as his Orchestra of Excited Strings actually consists of strings, horns, percussion, and just-intonation guitar. Yet he holds the same concern with microtonal structure that Conrad does, just through more propulsive music. Some people back in the Seventies used to talk about how the music of Steve Reich and Phillip Glass was somehow related to "rock," but those charlatans don't have anything on Arnold Dreyblatt. - Pataphysics Research Journal
Arnold Dreyblatt's 1995 Tzadik release, Animal Magnetism, includes many juxtaposed sections of repeating, skip-like structures that come off in a simple, lovely way. It is entirely likable with a lilting, pots-and-pans schizophrenia that insists we hear what normally doesn't work, what normally isn't called art. Embedded with quirk-pop elements, the pieces resemble deconstructed dance tunes reflected in a room full of mirrors. Slightly carnival moments, tweaked ska counter rhythms, percussive foregrounds overlying slide effects backgrounds, barely-contained marching band funk -- all these are part of Dreyblatt's musical world. - allmusic.com
| 1 | Arnold Dreyblatt | 5:46 | ||
| 2 | Arnold Dreyblatt | 5:35 | ||
| 3 | Arnold Dreyblatt | 7:56 | ||
| 4 | Arnold Dreyblatt | 4:03 | ||
| 5 | Arnold Dreyblatt | 4:48 | ||
| 6 | Arnold Dreyblatt | 5:37 | ||
| 7 |
Concentration Can Have Its Rewards
Ann Powers, New York Times, 2000 (Excerpt)
Ann Powers, New York Times, 2000 (Excerpt)
One could say that the entire history of my work in music has been derived from a single, subjective experience with sound, the composer Arnold Dreyblatt wrote in the program notes to a 1986 performance by his Orchestra of Excited Sounds. It is this experience which generates the music ideas - and not the other way around. This emphasis on the gut over the mind has had a deeply positive effect on his music, which he and a stellar ensemble performed Thursday and yesterday at Tonic...
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Tony Conrad's Response
to An open letter to La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, 2000 (Excerpt)
to An open letter to La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, 2000 (Excerpt)
I was very glad to see Arnold Dreyblatt's open letter, directed to La Monte Young and me, of which (he remarks) an excerpt is to appear in The Wire, September 2000. Dreyblatt speaks from his own perspective, which, as he firmly establishes, is highly privileged - especially as to his 'insider' knowledge of the history and record(ing)s pertinent to our discourse, but of course also as to his standing as a 'minimalist' composer/performer in his own right. In fact, he makes me acquainted with details of which I have been previously unaware, such as the fact that he was 'La Monte's first tape archivist,' a project and function that has been veiled from my interested view. I knew at the time that Dreyblatt was working to help Young archive his work, but to read the terms 'first' and then also 'tape archivist' puts a spin on Dreyblatt's participation that further emphasizes for me the screen behind which La Monte Young has spent decades recostuming his relationship to our work together...
Tony Conrad Buffalo, September 2000
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An open letter to La Monte Young and Tony Conrad
Arnold Dreyblatt, 2000 (Excerpt)
Arnold Dreyblatt, 2000 (Excerpt)
Numerous journalists, musicians and composers have been asking me to give an opinion on the continuing controversy between La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. The unexpected release of Day of Niagara seems only to make a response more pertinent. My reluctance until now is in great part due to my utmost respect for the work of both parties: both of whom has influenced my musical and visual work in countless ways, regardless of how our paths have later diverged.
Arnold Dreyblatt, Berlin, 2000
(A Shorter Version of this text has been published in 'The Wire', September, 2000)
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Interview EST Magazine. 1998 (Excerpt)
EST: What are you up to these days, musically? Is your music continuing on the same lines as the previous Orchestra of Excited Strings releases? I get the impression when I look at the 3 CDs of yours that I have (Nodal Excitation, Propellers in Love, Animal Magnetism) that theyre more a document of one large project-in-progress than stand-alone musical works, and I notice that in the AM inlay you say the music really only exists in performance. Could you expand on that?
AD: My musical activities have been expanding over the last few years. I had basically worked with my own performing ensemble, The Orchestra of Excited Strings since 1979. Last year, the Bang On A Can Allstars from New York commissioned a new version of Escalator which they have been performing in the States and in Europe since then. Also, Ive been working on a number of pieces for individual members of the ensemble. Also last year, I started performing with Jim ORourke and some of his friends in Chicago. Ive been very much stimulated by interest among the younger generation in my music, and I'm in a process of opening up the frame in which my music is made and performed. Already this year, the reissue of Nodal Excitation as well as The Sound of One String has come out. And Im going to be co-producing some of the last recordings of my Berlin ensemble with ORourke in Chicago as well as planning some new projects with Table of the Elements...
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Interview
Christoph Cox, 1998 (Excerpt)
Christoph Cox, 1998 (Excerpt)
CC: You mentioned that you feel a close kinship with Tony Conrad and that you were initially most influenced by his film/video work. Did you study with Conrad at Buffalo? If so, was it in a music or a film/video context.
AD: I first met Tony while a graduate student at the Center for Media Studies in Buffalo around '74- he was still teaching in Ohio and was just visiting. Tony didn't come to Buffalo until some years later. At first all I knew about him was the soundtrack for Flaming Creatures which I had seen at the Whitney Museum around '72. I was very interested in periodic visual perceptual phenomena- I was making 'flicker' videotapes when I was shown his early experiments and that of filmaker Paul Sharits (who also taught at Buffalo). But ironically, it was a concert by the Creative Associates of a work by Alvin Lucier (1974) which involved a display of sine waves in space that opened up the world of sound for me. As a student of the Vasulkas, (video artists who were teaching at Buffalo after founding the Kitchen in New York) I had been made keenly aware of the relationship between 'slow' frequencies of sound waves and those really high bandwiths of the electromagnetic spectrum. What was important for me was that it was all about waves. So when I entered that concert of Alvin Lucier, I suddenly realized that these were waves that one could percieve and experience and touch, that that musicians where really just comparing frequencies in their heads and that instrument builders had preserved this knowledge which was no longer concious for musicians. So I was hooked, and dived into sound and eventually 'music' for the next ten year.
Parts of this interview appeared in another form in The Wire, 1998
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do-it-yourself DOWNTOWN
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1995
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1995
The New Music Scene in New York 1970-1984 (Excerpt)
When speaking about the developments among New York music composers within the last twenty years, it's perhaps a too often used cliché to speak of American individualism, eclecticism and a "do-it-yourself" culture. Yet, from the perspective of Europe, where I've been based since leaving New York in 1984, the contrast seems all too clear. The explosion of creative activity which centered around New York in the early sixties mirrored developments in the arts as a whole, so we might at first take a look at the birth of this "New Music" scene within a larger cultural context.
Originally Published in the Catalog to the exhibition, US Arts, Berliner Festspiele, 1995. Download Full Text
When speaking about the developments among New York music composers within the last twenty years, it's perhaps a too often used cliché to speak of American individualism, eclecticism and a "do-it-yourself" culture. Yet, from the perspective of Europe, where I've been based since leaving New York in 1984, the contrast seems all too clear. The explosion of creative activity which centered around New York in the early sixties mirrored developments in the arts as a whole, so we might at first take a look at the birth of this "New Music" scene within a larger cultural context.
Originally Published in the Catalog to the exhibition, US Arts, Berliner Festspiele, 1995. Download Full Text
Some Personal Musical History Stories
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1989 New York (Excerpt)
My grandfather Max Dreyblatt played clarinet professionally in 'pit' orchestras for vaudeville and silent films in New York City. About to be drafted into World War One, he enlisted with his buddies from The Bronx as a military band which spent the war playing patriotic music in the trenches in France. Their job was to inspire the young boys in the infantry to jump out of the trenches only to be massacred. His grandparents, immigrants from Galicia operated a family ensemble entitled La Troupe Maximov which presented evenings of Gypsy, Russian and Turkish music during the late 19th century in Vienna...
first published in De Salon 1988-89, Groningen
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Beginnings, Theory, Histories
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1982, 1997 (Excerpt)
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1982, 1997 (Excerpt)
I proceeded from a kind of 'amateur' curiosity about sound and music, and developed a sense that composition begins with a consideration (often a re-consideration) of the dynamic materials of sound creation- e.g. strings and pipes, air and motion. In the development of my music, it has been the instruments themselves which have been my greatest teachers. For me, a composition is not a moment 'frozen' on a piece of paper but rather the result of a workshop in progress. The instrumentation and notations which have been developed for each stage in the history of my ensembles have been themselves a part of the composition, as is the workshop period in which new sections are developed while older pieces are gradually edited or abandoned. It is my hope that some continuity of thought and practice may be discernible within this text as well as in the music itself.In the early 1970's I had been working with video and electronic music at the Center for Media Study at the State University at Buffalo, N.Y. It was through an exposure there to the ideas of Woody and Steina Vasulka that I developed an interest in the physical characteristics of vibration...
Parts of this essay were originally published as a Graduate Thesis at Wesleyan University (1982), and later in the reissue of Nodal Excitation on Dexter's Cigar (1997)
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From My Notebooks, 1975-81 Arnold Dreyblatt (Excerpt)
Proposition IX: To explain why an open string when sounded makes many sounds at once. Proposition XV: To determine whether it is possible to touch the strings of an instrument or their keys so fast that the ear cannot discern whether the sound is composed of different sounds, or if it is unique and continuous. - Marin Mersenne, Harmonie Universelle, 1637
My work in image and sound synthesis in the early seventies initiated an interest in the interactions of waveform signal events an their hearing in the audio range, as sound , on acoustic instruments and finally, as music. Having neither a traditional music training or childhood indoctrination in this or that cultural scale or system I have found it convenient to apply my background in experimenting with electronic sound and image to composition with acoustic instruments: utilizing a tuning system derived from the harmonic series in lieu of traditional musical content...
Originally published in the CD Booklet of The Sound of One String, Table of the Elements, 1998
Download Full Texteyn luftmensch in Lahore/Maximoffs Doina (1992)
Two tracks recorded for a project of Geduldig and Tihimann (Vienna) for their CD project in 1992 in collaboration with my old collegue and friend Andy Statman. Also on this CD are pieces by Guy Klucevek and Eliot Sharp. We recorded in Brooklyn after a concert by the Orchestra of Excited Strings at La Mamma. I invited Andy Statman to play these pieces live with the ensemble at the 10th anniversary of the Berlin Orchestra of Excited Strings in Podewil in 1993.. - Arnold Dreyblatt
My Baggage
Installation: Vitrines, Plexiglass, Projections, Baggage Artifact, 2011
The centerpiece of the installation is a special travelling case which was fabricated at the Oxford Fiber Case Company in Brooklyn specifically for Dreyblatt's re-location to Berlin in 1983. The case still retains his last address in the United States in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn (in a former seaman's bar at 51 Kent Avenue). Dreyblat continued to use this case during his extensive travels to Eastern Europe during the 1980's and in my later visits back to the United States. Surrounding this case, which is displayed as an original artifact in a glass vitrine, are two enclosed L-shaped vitrine light boxes, each 2.5 meters long to be installed on platforms just under eye-level. The light boxes form both the bottom surface and back wall of the vitrine, so that one is able to percieve information content on multiple transparent layers, which combine to form unexpected encounters of autobiographical moments. Archival materials (photos, documents and video) are printed, viewed and projected in a "forest" of document sized upright standing transparent panels in such a way that one can look and read through them to deeper layers.Contained in these vitrines is an array of hundreds of autobiographical content items, culled from his personal archive of the last twenty-eight years, were organized and cataloged expressly for this project. As in much of his artistic work, the interplay of text, light and transparency play a pivital role in the perception of historical documentation. The archival content represents three different information layers, which in turn mirror a network of "times", "locations" and "relations": a) USA: Family Immigration and my first thirty years b) Berlin: from 1983 to the current time; and c) Eastern Europe: Family origins and personal research. In concieving this work, Dreyblatt imagined "looking-through" paths from New York to berlin to east europe, evoking multiple biographic identities, splintered, yet related and left open to interpretation by the viewer. During the development process, a decision was made not to provide commentary or explanation of the individual items. The installation represents one of Dreyblatt's few works which addresses the subject of archival storage and cultural memory from an autobiographic standpoint. "My Baggage" was commissioned by the Jewish Museum, Berlin expressly for the exhibition "Heimatkunde" (2011-2012). After the exhibition ended the installation became part the collection of the museum.
Writing Cage
7 Lenticular Objects, varying shapes and sizes, 2011
7 Lenticular Objects, varying shapes and sizes, 2011
Dreyblatt has used lenticular technology as a perceptually interactive means of display. Each work contains up to five text layers, which are viewable as text fragmentas from varying viewing positions, and which "overwite" each other as in a "palimpsest". As the viewer moves about the room, varying text content appears and disapears. The individual shapes of these seven works have been chosen from an archeological database of antique potsherds originating from ancient Greece and Rome, north and central America, the Near East and China. These shapes are the result of the "chance operations" of physical decay, a gradual historical process dating hundreds or thousands of years. The texts are derived from Dreyblatt's original copy of the 1967 paperback edition of "A Year from Monday, New Lectures and Writings by John Cage". The text fragments used in the work have been randomly chosen from a prepared list of all sentences in which either the words "text", "writing" or "reading" occur. Commissioned by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2011 "As my own work has become increasingly text-based both in performance and in installation, I have re-examined Cage's oevre in textual composition. In "A Year from Monday" he writes, "The thought has sometimes occurred to me that my pleasure in composition, renounced as it has been in the field of music, continues in the field of writing words, and that explains why, recently, I write so much." My own interests in the visual and audio perception of fragmentary layers of textual content are mirrored in seminal Cage works as "Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel (1969)" and in his extensive experimentation in printed text layout and vocal readings." - Arnold Dreyblatt
Inscriptions (Inschriften)
Permanent installation: 16 Lenticular Panels, 110 x 110 cm., 2010
Permanent installation: 16 Lenticular Panels, 110 x 110 cm., 2010
Permanently installed in four meetings rooms within the new Ministry of Agriculture, Nutrition and Consumer Protection (BMLEV), Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin, and dedicated in 2010. Winner, 1st Prize, Invited Competition, Federal Ministry for Buldings and Public Spaces (BBR) Berlin, 2008 Inscriptions is concieved as an interactive textual dialogue with the employees of the Ministirium who will pass through, meet and work in four meeting rooms. Lenticular printing technology was chosen as an perceptually interactive means of display. Each work contains up to five text layers, which are viewable as text fragments from varying viewing positions, and which seem to "overwite" each other as in a "palimpsest". As the viewer moves about the room, different text content appears and disapears, allowing one to 'create' one's own narrative about the history and workings of the BMELV Ministry. In this way the employee should become participants in a dialogue with the work, which can only be 'completed' through movement and reflection.
Text excerpts will be chosen as content for the work from the following themes:
a) the history of the BMELV Ministry;
b) the historical and architectural context of the building;
c) descriptions of activities and goals relating to the work of the BMELV Ministry;
d) historical and contemporary quotations from literature and science on subjects such as agriculture, nutriton, etc.
A theme has been concieved for each of the four meeting rooms:
1. Wilhelmstr. Nr. 54, history of the building housing the Ministry
2. Agriculture: texts from Marcus Porcius Cato (234 v. Chr. - 149 v. Chr.), Albrecht Daniel Thaer, (1752 - 1828), Johann Heinrich von Thünen, (1783 -1850)
3. Agricultural Politics and Policy in Germany
4. Consumer Protection
Text excerpts will be chosen as content for the work from the following themes:
a) the history of the BMELV Ministry;
b) the historical and architectural context of the building;
c) descriptions of activities and goals relating to the work of the BMELV Ministry;
d) historical and contemporary quotations from literature and science on subjects such as agriculture, nutriton, etc.
A theme has been concieved for each of the four meeting rooms:
1. Wilhelmstr. Nr. 54, history of the building housing the Ministry
2. Agriculture: texts from Marcus Porcius Cato (234 v. Chr. - 149 v. Chr.), Albrecht Daniel Thaer, (1752 - 1828), Johann Heinrich von Thünen, (1783 -1850)
3. Agricultural Politics and Policy in Germany
4. Consumer Protection
Unsaid (Unausgesprochen)
permanent installation, privalite glass, data projections, mirror, 2008
permanent installation, privalite glass, data projections, mirror, 2008
The work was commissioned by- and is installed within the Permanent Exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
One arrives at the site at the end of a journey through German Jewish History representing the last section of the permanent historical exhibition at the museum. This site depicting the "Shoah" is situated at the intersection of pre- and post- war exhibition areas. Historical documents have been selected from the Museum archives from two sources:
a. Letters from burocratic offices to individuals about preparations for deportation and eventual transports to the east.
b. The last correspondance from Ghettos and extermination camps.
One approaches a glass barrier made up of vertical sections which are either transparent or opaque when data messages begin writing on them. One has the feeling that one cannot proceed further, yet one can see through the panels, revealing a hint of what follows. The visitor is intrigued by the dynamic rhythm of the panels appearing and disapearing, and by the pace of the digital writing on the glass.
Along a line in the floor which transverses the space at an angle (and which represents lines which intersect the original architecture), a glass barrier is built in eight sections, each 1 meter wide and 3 meters high. Four data projectors are mounted from the cieling behind the glass barrier and are connected to a computer.
A section of mirrored glass is mounted on the right diagonal wall, opening up the space and reflecting the wall of glass and the dynamic movement of the displays and changing panels.
The barrier is composed of eight 'Priva-lite' glass panels, each 2.5 x 1 meters mounted in steel frames. When electricity is applied to the glass, it is transparent; when the current is turned off, the glass is opaque, thereby functioning as a projection surface.
The glass panels and the projectors are synchronized. There is one projector each for two panels, representing one document fragment. When a document pair are 'active', the glass becomes opaque, and the document information (left side) and content information (right side) begin 'writing', letter by letter, simultaneously, at eye level.
The four projection pairs are either in an 'active' (projection, opaque) or 'inactive' (transparent) state. From one to four active states may be happening at any one time. The patterns of active and inactive panels is changing all the time, creating a sense of dynamic rhythm in the space. At the same time, sections of the wall seem to disapear and reappear at other locations. The selection and display of the texts is random.
One arrives at the site at the end of a journey through German Jewish History representing the last section of the permanent historical exhibition at the museum. This site depicting the "Shoah" is situated at the intersection of pre- and post- war exhibition areas. Historical documents have been selected from the Museum archives from two sources:
a. Letters from burocratic offices to individuals about preparations for deportation and eventual transports to the east.
b. The last correspondance from Ghettos and extermination camps.
One approaches a glass barrier made up of vertical sections which are either transparent or opaque when data messages begin writing on them. One has the feeling that one cannot proceed further, yet one can see through the panels, revealing a hint of what follows. The visitor is intrigued by the dynamic rhythm of the panels appearing and disapearing, and by the pace of the digital writing on the glass.
Along a line in the floor which transverses the space at an angle (and which represents lines which intersect the original architecture), a glass barrier is built in eight sections, each 1 meter wide and 3 meters high. Four data projectors are mounted from the cieling behind the glass barrier and are connected to a computer.
A section of mirrored glass is mounted on the right diagonal wall, opening up the space and reflecting the wall of glass and the dynamic movement of the displays and changing panels.
The barrier is composed of eight 'Priva-lite' glass panels, each 2.5 x 1 meters mounted in steel frames. When electricity is applied to the glass, it is transparent; when the current is turned off, the glass is opaque, thereby functioning as a projection surface.
The glass panels and the projectors are synchronized. There is one projector each for two panels, representing one document fragment. When a document pair are 'active', the glass becomes opaque, and the document information (left side) and content information (right side) begin 'writing', letter by letter, simultaneously, at eye level.
The four projection pairs are either in an 'active' (projection, opaque) or 'inactive' (transparent) state. From one to four active states may be happening at any one time. The patterns of active and inactive panels is changing all the time, creating a sense of dynamic rhythm in the space. At the same time, sections of the wall seem to disapear and reappear at other locations. The selection and display of the texts is random.
Turntable History
media turntable, data projection, slide projection, sound, 2009
media turntable, data projection, slide projection, sound, 2009
Galerie Singuhr, Kleiner Wasserspeicher, Berlin
Produced with support of Hauptstadtkulturfonds
This text, image and sound installation was especially concieved for the circular vaulted brick space of the historical water container in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. Specific information content is derived from archival documentation concerning the history of the site. A 'media turntable' spins animated text content around the inner and outer spaces of the space. Other sound and image sources are located at fixed locations on the peripheral walls. The text/image and sound material is percievable as fragments which appear and disapear throughout the media environment.
Text and Image
The central turntable contains two data projectors facing outwards which are connected to a computer. The text content is programmed to scroll out of view at a speed corresponding to the speed of rotation in reverse, giving one the impression that the text is standing still. The texts are projected on both the inner and outer circles of the space, at times 'hugging' the multiple archways.
Four stationary carousel slide projectors are controlled by computer software. Enlarged sections of original blueprints of the site are projected in black and white negative on the outer walls.
Audio Composition
A 40 minute five channel sound composition was created for five loudspeakers which are positioned throughout the space. The sound content is derived from recordings which Dreyblatt made of MRI Magnetic Resonance medical scanning..
Produced with support of Hauptstadtkulturfonds
This text, image and sound installation was especially concieved for the circular vaulted brick space of the historical water container in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. Specific information content is derived from archival documentation concerning the history of the site. A 'media turntable' spins animated text content around the inner and outer spaces of the space. Other sound and image sources are located at fixed locations on the peripheral walls. The text/image and sound material is percievable as fragments which appear and disapear throughout the media environment.
Text and Image
The central turntable contains two data projectors facing outwards which are connected to a computer. The text content is programmed to scroll out of view at a speed corresponding to the speed of rotation in reverse, giving one the impression that the text is standing still. The texts are projected on both the inner and outer circles of the space, at times 'hugging' the multiple archways.
Four stationary carousel slide projectors are controlled by computer software. Enlarged sections of original blueprints of the site are projected in black and white negative on the outer walls.
Audio Composition
A 40 minute five channel sound composition was created for five loudspeakers which are positioned throughout the space. The sound content is derived from recordings which Dreyblatt made of MRI Magnetic Resonance medical scanning..
Ephemeris Epigraphica
15 lenticular images, 120 cm x 75 cm, 2006
15 lenticular images, 120 cm x 75 cm, 2006
These fifteen lenticular text images refer to Benjamin's famous essay, "Ausgraben und Erinnern" (Walter Benjamin, Ausgraben und Erinnern, in: ders., Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. IV.1, hg. von Tillmann Rexroth, Frankfurt a.M. 1972, S. 400 f.)
The texts are derived from online epigraphic databases of ancient inscriptions maintained by European and North American Archaelogical research institutions (list below). Commentaries to thousands of papyrus, stone, clay and wax inscriptions were collected from these databases, specifically chosen for content refering to readability and fragmentation.
Lenticular technology was chosen as an perceptually interactive means of display. Each work contains up to five text layers, which are viewable as text fragments from varying viewing positions, and which seem to "overwite" each other as in a "palimpsest".
The texts are derived from online epigraphic databases of ancient inscriptions maintained by European and North American Archaelogical research institutions (list below). Commentaries to thousands of papyrus, stone, clay and wax inscriptions were collected from these databases, specifically chosen for content refering to readability and fragmentation.
Lenticular technology was chosen as an perceptually interactive means of display. Each work contains up to five text layers, which are viewable as text fragments from varying viewing positions, and which seem to "overwite" each other as in a "palimpsest".
Register
wood, steel, plexiglass, data projection, 3 flat displays, 2007
wood, steel, plexiglass, data projection, 3 flat displays, 2007
At the end of a long darkened corridor, one percieves an oversized card catalog in black, as one recognizes from libraries and offices. The catalog contains thirty drawers, each fitted with the shining metal frames and handles which clearly identify their archival function. Within these frames, where normally the little paper cards which mark the contents of that drawer would be, the data is active and continually changing.
In the lower area of this large piece of virtual furniture are three flat LCD screens, mounted vertically and partially disappearing into the black box. Here, an endless row of documents 'march' head-first into the 'machine' as if they being inputed for further data analysis within the catalog drawers above. The 'entry categories' of the series of documents are written dynamically on the face of the drawers, letter by letter in a series of 'chapters', each representing the data structure of a document.
Due to a built-in randomness integrated into the program processes (as to location, order, and time), the display of the data will never be exactly the same when the software program repeats its sequence. These entries are derived from the questionaires and index cards from the recently found archive of the Jewish Community of Vienna during the Third Reich era. The work was commissioned by the Jewish Museum of Vienna for the exhibition, 'Ordunung Muß Sein' ('Order must be'), and is a collaboration with the archive of the Jewish Community of Vienna.
Software Programming: Alexander Krestovsky and Gregor Kö
Production: 'Anlaufstelle der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde Wien' and 'Jüdisches Museum Wien"
Original Plan for Installation
In the lower area of this large piece of virtual furniture are three flat LCD screens, mounted vertically and partially disappearing into the black box. Here, an endless row of documents 'march' head-first into the 'machine' as if they being inputed for further data analysis within the catalog drawers above. The 'entry categories' of the series of documents are written dynamically on the face of the drawers, letter by letter in a series of 'chapters', each representing the data structure of a document.
Due to a built-in randomness integrated into the program processes (as to location, order, and time), the display of the data will never be exactly the same when the software program repeats its sequence. These entries are derived from the questionaires and index cards from the recently found archive of the Jewish Community of Vienna during the Third Reich era. The work was commissioned by the Jewish Museum of Vienna for the exhibition, 'Ordunung Muß Sein' ('Order must be'), and is a collaboration with the archive of the Jewish Community of Vienna.
Software Programming: Alexander Krestovsky and Gregor Kö
Production: 'Anlaufstelle der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde Wien' and 'Jüdisches Museum Wien"
Original Plan for Installation 
Innocent Questions
permanent installation, sandblasted glass, LED displays, 2006
permanent installation, sandblasted glass, LED displays, 2006
'Innocent Questions' was the winner of a closed competition initiated by the The National Foundation for Art in Public Buildings, Oslo (Utsmykkingsfondet for offentlige bygg) in 2004 for a permanent artistic work in front the Villa Grande, a villa occupied by Vidkun Quisling from 1941-1945. The Villa is currently the site of the "HL Senteret", The Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities.
In developing a concept for an artistic intervention for the Villa Grande I preferred not be limited by the particular historical circumstances associated with this site. I have chosen rather to focus on the use of the 'personal questionnaire' in population registration systems as the defining element that thematically connects the Holocaust in Norway with other genocides of the twentieth century and with the administration of foreigners and other minorities in contemporary society.
The winter snow and the dramatic approach up the hill to the site call for a vertical installation as a transformation of the imposing and grotesque historical building facade. In renovating and reconstructing the 'Villa Grande,' fire and safety regulations required an external stairwell to be fixed on the facade to the left of the main entrance. I proposed to utilize the structure of the stairwell in order to physically support the installation of 'Innocent Questions.'
Attached to the structure of the stairwell is an array of twelve panel-boxes, mounted within a steel frame. These panels are designed to form one unified image (size: 8330 x 4070 cm.), which is perceived in three distinct optical layers:
Non-Reflective Image: Sandblasted onto the hardened surface of the outermost glass layer of each panel is a reconstruction of a historical 'punch card' , representing the reduction of the individual to number and category. This image is perceived as non-reflective, creating a heightened contrast to the reflectivity of the underlying mirrored surface.
Reflected Environment: The work functions as a mirrored wall that reflects the natural environment: the trees and sky, and the visiting public. The face of the historical building is thereby opened and partially erased.
Illuminated Texts: Mounted onto the rear of each panel within the punch card image, are words and phrases written in fixed light-emitting diodes (LED's). This textual content has been derived from historical and contemporary personal questionnaires.
The rear of the work is sealed, and the illuminated red LED texts appear as an ephemeral image, suspended in the reflecting mirror. Only the illuminated LED texts are seen through the mirrored glass, which is otherwise fully reflective of the environment.
The words and phrases appear and disappear within a slow and randomly generated temporal composition perceived within the virtual punch card image. Because the appearance of illuminated words and phrases is continually changing, new combinations of words and phrases arise, igniting unexpected associations from the questionnaire entries as one passes the work.
During the hours of daylight, the mirror glass reflects the trees and sky. The information layers (non-reflective image, reflected environment and illuminated text) are clearly visible. In the hours of darkness, artificial side lighting illuminates the non-reflecting sandblasted surfaces of the outer glass layer, which would otherwise be imperceptible.
In my concept for a permanent installation at the site, a list of 'Innocent Questions,' derived from historical and contemporary sources and representing a composite collective questionnaire, is contrasted with the image of a historical 'punch card.' Together, this is a representation of the collection, archiving and application of personal data by political systems for administrative and often questionable use.
In developing a concept for an artistic intervention for the Villa Grande I preferred not be limited by the particular historical circumstances associated with this site. I have chosen rather to focus on the use of the 'personal questionnaire' in population registration systems as the defining element that thematically connects the Holocaust in Norway with other genocides of the twentieth century and with the administration of foreigners and other minorities in contemporary society.
The winter snow and the dramatic approach up the hill to the site call for a vertical installation as a transformation of the imposing and grotesque historical building facade. In renovating and reconstructing the 'Villa Grande,' fire and safety regulations required an external stairwell to be fixed on the facade to the left of the main entrance. I proposed to utilize the structure of the stairwell in order to physically support the installation of 'Innocent Questions.'
Attached to the structure of the stairwell is an array of twelve panel-boxes, mounted within a steel frame. These panels are designed to form one unified image (size: 8330 x 4070 cm.), which is perceived in three distinct optical layers:
Non-Reflective Image: Sandblasted onto the hardened surface of the outermost glass layer of each panel is a reconstruction of a historical 'punch card' , representing the reduction of the individual to number and category. This image is perceived as non-reflective, creating a heightened contrast to the reflectivity of the underlying mirrored surface.
Reflected Environment: The work functions as a mirrored wall that reflects the natural environment: the trees and sky, and the visiting public. The face of the historical building is thereby opened and partially erased.
Illuminated Texts: Mounted onto the rear of each panel within the punch card image, are words and phrases written in fixed light-emitting diodes (LED's). This textual content has been derived from historical and contemporary personal questionnaires.
The rear of the work is sealed, and the illuminated red LED texts appear as an ephemeral image, suspended in the reflecting mirror. Only the illuminated LED texts are seen through the mirrored glass, which is otherwise fully reflective of the environment.
The words and phrases appear and disappear within a slow and randomly generated temporal composition perceived within the virtual punch card image. Because the appearance of illuminated words and phrases is continually changing, new combinations of words and phrases arise, igniting unexpected associations from the questionnaire entries as one passes the work.
During the hours of daylight, the mirror glass reflects the trees and sky. The information layers (non-reflective image, reflected environment and illuminated text) are clearly visible. In the hours of darkness, artificial side lighting illuminates the non-reflecting sandblasted surfaces of the outer glass layer, which would otherwise be imperceptible.
In my concept for a permanent installation at the site, a list of 'Innocent Questions,' derived from historical and contemporary sources and representing a composite collective questionnaire, is contrasted with the image of a historical 'punch card.' Together, this is a representation of the collection, archiving and application of personal data by political systems for administrative and often questionable use.
Recovery Rotation
rotating stroboscopic text machine, 2003
rotating stroboscopic text machine, 2003
A motor-driven rotating cylinder, 80 centimeters high and with a diameter of one meter, mounted on a stand. The core of the cylinder contains an wired array of 100 flashbulbs which face the outer surface. This surface is composed of multiple layers of plexiglass and film which appear white when inactive.
Approximately every seven seconds, an extremely intensive 360 degree flash illuminates eleven circular text phrases which are inscribed into the cylinder surface. As the cylinder is slowly turns, one percieves new text fragments with each flash, which are only readable as an afterimage in the brain, white letters on a black background.
The texts are derived from scientific texts based on the phenomena of Flashbulb Memory. Texts from: R. Brown & J. Kulik, Flashbulb Memories, in: Cognition, 5, 1997, S. 73-99; RB Livingston, Reinforcement, in: The Neuro Sciences, A Study Program, Rockefeller Press, New York 1967; U. Neusser, Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Context, W. H. Freeman, New York 1982; etc.
The installation Recovery Rotation was created in cooperation between the Festival Conceptualisms: Contemporary Receptions in Music, Art, and Film, commissioned by the Akademie der Künste Berlin, curated by Christoph Metzger, and made possible by funds from the foundation Hauptstadtkulturfonds) and the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken.
Approximately every seven seconds, an extremely intensive 360 degree flash illuminates eleven circular text phrases which are inscribed into the cylinder surface. As the cylinder is slowly turns, one percieves new text fragments with each flash, which are only readable as an afterimage in the brain, white letters on a black background.
The texts are derived from scientific texts based on the phenomena of Flashbulb Memory. Texts from: R. Brown & J. Kulik, Flashbulb Memories, in: Cognition, 5, 1997, S. 73-99; RB Livingston, Reinforcement, in: The Neuro Sciences, A Study Program, Rockefeller Press, New York 1967; U. Neusser, Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Context, W. H. Freeman, New York 1982; etc.
The installation Recovery Rotation was created in cooperation between the Festival Conceptualisms: Contemporary Receptions in Music, Art, and Film, commissioned by the Akademie der Künste Berlin, curated by Christoph Metzger, and made possible by funds from the foundation Hauptstadtkulturfonds) and the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken.
The Wunderblock
table, chair, TFT display, computer, 2000
table, chair, TFT display, computer, 2000
Table from MDF with internally mounted TFT-Display and Computer, Chair.
In 1925, Freud wrote a text that compares the faculty of memory to a child's toy known as a Wunderblock. It consists of a wax slab stretched with cellophane, upon which a text may be inscribed, and just as readily erased by lifting the cellophane layer up and away from the wax slab.
In contrast to Freud's model, in which the pressure of the act of inscription onto the cellophane surface continues in the direction of the underlying layer of wax, in 'The Wunderblock', the original selection and entry of data has been concluded in the past. The movement originates from ROM and is held in RAM, before travelling up towards the surface.
Quite independently of our own states of presence or absence, the installation searches and inscribes autonomously. One has the impression that the underlying textual sources can never be perceived in their entirety. Because the many texts fragments are inscribed and erased simultaneously, one can read a given fragment only with difficulty before it vanishes. The model of memory demonstrated here is at once highly unstable, fragmentary, incomplete, perishable and ephemeral.
The sentence fragments appearing and disappearing on the screen describe a process of finding and loss, safeguarding and destruction.
Texts from: Sigmund Freud, Notiz über den `Wunderblock', Wien 1925; A Glossary for Archivists, The Society of American Archivists, Chicago 1992
Software: Alexandr Krestovskij
Download
In 1925, Freud wrote a text that compares the faculty of memory to a child's toy known as a Wunderblock. It consists of a wax slab stretched with cellophane, upon which a text may be inscribed, and just as readily erased by lifting the cellophane layer up and away from the wax slab.
In contrast to Freud's model, in which the pressure of the act of inscription onto the cellophane surface continues in the direction of the underlying layer of wax, in 'The Wunderblock', the original selection and entry of data has been concluded in the past. The movement originates from ROM and is held in RAM, before travelling up towards the surface.
Quite independently of our own states of presence or absence, the installation searches and inscribes autonomously. One has the impression that the underlying textual sources can never be perceived in their entirety. Because the many texts fragments are inscribed and erased simultaneously, one can read a given fragment only with difficulty before it vanishes. The model of memory demonstrated here is at once highly unstable, fragmentary, incomplete, perishable and ephemeral.
The sentence fragments appearing and disappearing on the screen describe a process of finding and loss, safeguarding and destruction.
Texts from: Sigmund Freud, Notiz über den `Wunderblock', Wien 1925; A Glossary for Archivists, The Society of American Archivists, Chicago 1992
Software: Alexandr Krestovskij
Download 
The ReCollection Mechanism,
data projection, circular wire screen, sound, 1998
data projection, circular wire screen, sound, 1998
Black room, computer data projection, suspended wire mesh, sound equipment. Size variable.
An automated writing and recitation machine is found in a darkened black space. One enters a three dimensional data architecture where the process of searching, sorting and locating words and the overlapping inter-textual linkages of information are simulated optically by metaphors of transparence and complexity. Projected onto a barely visible cylindrical screen are multiple transparent layers of continually flowing historical data, which appear to be suspended in the center of the space, and which delineate the room contours with textual landscapes.
Two computers randomly search and locate thousands of words within an endless virtual page of biographical information in real time. As each word is found, it is highlighted visually and spoken out loud by a male or female voice. The voices gradually cross each other in time, creating a dialog. The viewer participates in a deconstruction of history through a non-linear and associational reading of forgotten archival fragments.
Texts from: Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933
An automated writing and recitation machine is found in a darkened black space. One enters a three dimensional data architecture where the process of searching, sorting and locating words and the overlapping inter-textual linkages of information are simulated optically by metaphors of transparence and complexity. Projected onto a barely visible cylindrical screen are multiple transparent layers of continually flowing historical data, which appear to be suspended in the center of the space, and which delineate the room contours with textual landscapes.
Two computers randomly search and locate thousands of words within an endless virtual page of biographical information in real time. As each word is found, it is highlighted visually and spoken out loud by a male or female voice. The voices gradually cross each other in time, creating a dialog. The viewer participates in a deconstruction of history through a non-linear and associational reading of forgotten archival fragments.
Texts from: Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933
T-Mail
data projection, database, black plexiglass, 1999
data projection, database, black plexiglass, 1999
Data projection on plexiglass, sound equipment, size variable.
One thousand documents have been entered into a database which reports the life of T., (b. 1879 Paks, Hungary - d. 1943 Shanghai, China), a forgotten Central European historical figure whose multiple identities span three continents (Europe, North America and Asia) and touch on many of the most important events of the pre-war period. The work is derived from a larger collection of over 4,000 intelligence documents from State Archives in Europe and North America from the inter-war period.
The collection contains daily reports and correspondances between 1915 and 1943, forming a vast communication network in which the official traces and observations of the individual are cross-referenced to historical events, international personalities and geographic locations.
In the interactive display of 'T-Mail' new documents are chosen randomly from the database, a scan of the next document gradually slides into view as various thematic categories and cross-links are activated. Text writings are simultaneously emitted sonically as morse code, in five different sine wave frequencies which change with consecutive paragraphs.
Texts from: The Public Record Office and The British Library, London; The National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Bonn, etc.
Related Web Project: http://www.leuphana.de/tmail
One thousand documents have been entered into a database which reports the life of T., (b. 1879 Paks, Hungary - d. 1943 Shanghai, China), a forgotten Central European historical figure whose multiple identities span three continents (Europe, North America and Asia) and touch on many of the most important events of the pre-war period. The work is derived from a larger collection of over 4,000 intelligence documents from State Archives in Europe and North America from the inter-war period.
The collection contains daily reports and correspondances between 1915 and 1943, forming a vast communication network in which the official traces and observations of the individual are cross-referenced to historical events, international personalities and geographic locations.
In the interactive display of 'T-Mail' new documents are chosen randomly from the database, a scan of the next document gradually slides into view as various thematic categories and cross-links are activated. Text writings are simultaneously emitted sonically as morse code, in five different sine wave frequencies which change with consecutive paragraphs.
Texts from: The Public Record Office and The British Library, London; The National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Bonn, etc.
Related Web Project: http://www.leuphana.de/tmail
The Reading Projects, 1991 - 2005
performance installations
In 1991, I received a commission to create what I imagined as a Hypertext Opera based on an edition of 'Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933' which I had found some years earlier. This theatrical production, which toured in various forms and languages until 1997, was realized containing a libretto assembled from thousands of biographical fragments. The project involved music compositions performed by my music ensemble; spoken and projected text, a sound installation derived from historical audio sources, and an image projection composition of amateur photographic material of the period.
I soon became frustrated with the passive theatrical situation of the proscenium stage and became interested in presenting the living environment in which historical data is stored and archived. In order to make this process transparent, I wanted the public to be involved in a more active sense, and I gradually developed a model for performance and installation which has been presented in various European cities under differing titles since 1995.
The basic concept of these site and city-specific projects involves the invitation of several hundred inhabitants of a city who are then invited to take part in a functioning yet temporary archival installation system. Selections from the archival holdings are read out loud collectively according to a precise timeplan or score. Hundreds of persons from the contemporary cityscape reflect hundreds of forgotten individuals from the past by their presence and participation.
The Reading Projects have been realized in various spatial and temporal contexts, often lasting for four to five hours, over many days or weeks at a time. I am continually experimenting and modifying the forms of presentation, yet the basic elements have remained: A Burocracy which administers the network of travelling archival files, readers, and visitors; a functioning archive system containing historical and contemporary documents; and a reading space or communal area in which the actual reading takes place.
I soon became frustrated with the passive theatrical situation of the proscenium stage and became interested in presenting the living environment in which historical data is stored and archived. In order to make this process transparent, I wanted the public to be involved in a more active sense, and I gradually developed a model for performance and installation which has been presented in various European cities under differing titles since 1995.
The basic concept of these site and city-specific projects involves the invitation of several hundred inhabitants of a city who are then invited to take part in a functioning yet temporary archival installation system. Selections from the archival holdings are read out loud collectively according to a precise timeplan or score. Hundreds of persons from the contemporary cityscape reflect hundreds of forgotten individuals from the past by their presence and participation.
The Reading Projects have been realized in various spatial and temporal contexts, often lasting for four to five hours, over many days or weeks at a time. I am continually experimenting and modifying the forms of presentation, yet the basic elements have remained: A Burocracy which administers the network of travelling archival files, readers, and visitors; a functioning archive system containing historical and contemporary documents; and a reading space or communal area in which the actual reading takes place.
The T Documents
84 facsimile archival documents, 1992
84 facsimile archival documents, 1992
84 chronological archive documents, plastic envelopes, format DIN A4, nails with spacers
'The T Documents' is one of a number of related works derived from over 4,000 intelligence documents from State Archives in Europe and North America from the inter-war period which have been collected by the artist.
These documents reveal the life of 'T'., (b. 1879 Paks, Hungary - d. 1943 Shanghai, China), a forgotten Central European historical figure whose multiple identities span three continents (Europe, North America and Asia) and touch on many of the most important events of the pre-war period. The collection contains daily reports and correspondances between 1915 and 1943, forming a vast communication network in which the official traces and observations of the individual are cross-referenced to historical events, international personalities and geographic locations.
In the installation 'The T Documents', the artist's personal selection of 84 original archive documents have been digitized and faked by specially developed printing techniques applied to the reverse side of postwar East German archival pages, posing question about the identity of both the subject's personality and the authenticity of the documents themselves. The documents are displayed in chronological order in transparent envelopes hanging on metal hooks. Selected excerpts are translated and typed in German on small strips of paper which has been inserted into the envelopes.
In related works, thousands of documents have been entered into a database and are displayed by computer projection. A realization for the World Wide Web has been prepared in collaboration with the University of Lüneburg, Department of Cultural Studies.
Sources: The Public Record Office and The British Library, London; The National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Bonn, etc.
Related Web Project: http://www.leuphana.de/tmail
'The T Documents' is one of a number of related works derived from over 4,000 intelligence documents from State Archives in Europe and North America from the inter-war period which have been collected by the artist.
These documents reveal the life of 'T'., (b. 1879 Paks, Hungary - d. 1943 Shanghai, China), a forgotten Central European historical figure whose multiple identities span three continents (Europe, North America and Asia) and touch on many of the most important events of the pre-war period. The collection contains daily reports and correspondances between 1915 and 1943, forming a vast communication network in which the official traces and observations of the individual are cross-referenced to historical events, international personalities and geographic locations.
In the installation 'The T Documents', the artist's personal selection of 84 original archive documents have been digitized and faked by specially developed printing techniques applied to the reverse side of postwar East German archival pages, posing question about the identity of both the subject's personality and the authenticity of the documents themselves. The documents are displayed in chronological order in transparent envelopes hanging on metal hooks. Selected excerpts are translated and typed in German on small strips of paper which has been inserted into the envelopes.
In related works, thousands of documents have been entered into a database and are displayed by computer projection. A realization for the World Wide Web has been prepared in collaboration with the University of Lüneburg, Department of Cultural Studies.
Sources: The Public Record Office and The British Library, London; The National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Bonn, etc.
Related Web Project: http://www.leuphana.de/tmail
The Great Archive
wooden boxes, inscribed plexiglass, illumination, 1993
wooden boxes, inscribed plexiglass, illumination, 1993
A historical hypertext becomes a three-dimensional image. A black box is divided by four lateral sheets of glass inscribed from edge to edge with layers of finely printed texts. The text layers are illuminated from below. The texts are reconstructed from the tens of thousands of biographical fragments.
As one peers into this sea of information, it is as if one stares into a bottomless well filled with multiple levels of floating texts in depth. One focuses one's eyes on any given text fragment on a given level, as the other text levels defocus and blur, becoming illegible. One's attention might wander to a remote or nearby fragment, our eyes continually refocusing as we isolate and connect a related or unrelated name or phrase.
A grain of sand is propelled into our field of vision for a single moment, separating forground from background, only to vanish gradually into the collective ocean of memory. The intention is to realize, in three dimensions, a hypertext as a metaphorical space which contains in compressed form a database of all mankind.
Texts from: Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933
As one peers into this sea of information, it is as if one stares into a bottomless well filled with multiple levels of floating texts in depth. One focuses one's eyes on any given text fragment on a given level, as the other text levels defocus and blur, becoming illegible. One's attention might wander to a remote or nearby fragment, our eyes continually refocusing as we isolate and connect a related or unrelated name or phrase.
A grain of sand is propelled into our field of vision for a single moment, separating forground from background, only to vanish gradually into the collective ocean of memory. The intention is to realize, in three dimensions, a hypertext as a metaphorical space which contains in compressed form a database of all mankind.
Texts from: Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933
Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933
hypertext multimedia opera, 1991
hypertext multimedia opera, 1991
The production won the Philip Morris Art Prize in 1992.
Materials: Computer synchronized slide projection system, eight channel sound environment, 16 mm film projection
Performers: three speakers of texts, composition performed by The Orchestra of Excited Strings; Vocalist: Shelley Hirsch
Set in a Procenium arch situation, in which a series of scrim material walls divide the stage space laterally into several light zones. Private (amateur) photographs and films, and documentary sound materials (language and music) representing the regions and the time period have been selected from archives and personal collections. Light and shadow integrate the performers within the projections. An opera libretto composed of textual historical fragments was sung and spoken by the performers.
Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American composer and visual artist. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier and media art with Steina and Woody Vasulka. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, he was elected to the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin).
In his installations, performances and media works, Dreyblatt creates complex textual and spatial metaphors for memory which function as a media discourse on recollection and the archive. His installations, public artworks and performances have been exhibited and staged extensively in Europe. "Dreyblatt's project, maintains its edge--and its importance for the rethinking of identity, history, culture, and memory--by refusing to retreat from or transcend [...] public, archival traces." - Jeffrey Wallen, Hampshire College.
Among the second generation of New York minimal composers, Arnold Dreyblatt has developed a unique approach to composition and music performance. He has invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. His compositions are based on harmonics, and thus just intonation, played either through a bowing technique he developed for his modified bass, and other modified and conventional instruments which he specially tuned. He originally used a steady pulse provided by the bowing motion on his bass (placing his music in the minimal category), but he eventually added many more instruments and more rhythmic variety.
In 1998 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
Dreyblatt's mother, Lucille Wallenrod (1918–1998), was a painter.
Discography
- Resonant Relations, Cantaloupe Music, CD, 2008
- Live at Federal Hall, Table of the Elements, CD, 2006
- Lapse, Table of the Elements, LP, 2004
- The Adding Machine, Cantaloupe Music, CD, 2002
- Escalator on “Renegade Heaven, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Cantaloupe Music, CD, 2000
- The Sound of One String – Previously Unreleased Live Recordings 1979-1992, Table of the Elements, CD, 1998
- Animal Magnetism, Tzadik Records, CD
- a haymisch groove, Extraplatte, Vienna, CD, 1994
- Propellers in Love, and “High Life”, HatART, CD, 1986
- Nodal Excitation, India Navigation Records, LP, 1982 - wikipedia
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