The piece Well-Planned Theft for stolen and synthesised sounds deals with productive piracy and looks for aesthetic potentials in the notation – in this case in itself not necessary – of electronic music. It is a stereo composition consisting mainly of sounds taken from various pop songs. These more or less short sound particles are all chosen in such a way that they do not allow any conclusion to be drawn about a specific song in terms of sound. Instead, they stand for certain sound topoi. The theft is artificial in that it is only revealed in the score – as an assertion, so to speak – but cannot be heard from the sound itself.

The initial sounds were initially described relatively precisely in a production score in the style of a bibliography. Reproducing the piece with some interpretive fuzziness would thus be possible. The temporal organisation of the sounds is then established by means of a traditional rhythm notation. The stolen sounds are augmented by some synthesis sounds.

Well-planned Theft proposes a way of notating complex electronic sounds very accurately and yet very easily by considering the entire corpus of published music as a repository of musical material that can be referenced by means of citation. Here, notation is understood less as a medium of communication and more as a compositional tool.

Well-Planned Theft was premiered at KONTAKTE Festival, Akademy of Arts Berlin, 24.09.2022.

Most musical material in Talk Show is derived from audio-to-midi-conversions of political TV-discussions – interpreted freely ‘by hand’, trying to find some sense in the glitchy and impossible-to-play results. How much ‘Talk Show’ is left after this process of transformation, which erases all the semantic information of the original conversation?

Recorded at Pina Bausch Theater, Folkwang Uni, Essen, on 11.01.2022 by Arthur Jogerst. Performed by Ensemble Perspektive.