Playback Play (1996)
(News from the Music Fair)

In Spring 1996 I visited a music fair for the first time. Many aspects of this sort of event, in which instruments and electronic equipment are tried out, and musical presentations of all kinds take place at the same time, where the curiosity of the customers, the inflated sales pitch of the producers, the polyphony of noises and sounds and the incessant professional patter all mix into an unimaginable polyphony, inspired me to make this composition.

But I consciously avoided giving a faithful reproduction of the event, since what I had in mind was neither a chronicle of my visit nor an authentic report. On the contrary: the phenomenon music fair served here as an inventive source for a decidedly personal interpretation. Some elements were placed in the foreground, such as the frequent interaction of seriousness and entertainment, and the simultaneous presentation of live and canned music over the loudspeakers. One also encounters celebrities from other fields, who are always welcome at events of this magnitude.

The presentations at the music fair were observed acoustically from perspectives with different sharpnesses of focus, comparable to the variety permitted by the various settings of a camera lens. Hence, for example, the treatment of space and instrumental sound, or by replaying what is heard over headphones (this piece of equipment with the peculiar property of turning listeners into erratic blocks).

The result is a fluid counterpoint of impressions, a kaleidoscope in which, as really happens at such a music fair, different situations unexpectedly succeed one another and coexist simultaneously.

Play and back and forth and play and…

M. K.
(Translation by Richard Toop)