[02] Arno Peeters: Fossile Sounds. Memory Mining

Czech premiere of acoustic composition by Dutch composer Peeters, recorded in 2004 in the Kladno mine region.

Arno Peeters was born in 1969. At age fifteen, he began to experiment with cassette recorders and cheap hi-fi technology. Like probably anyone else who is a part of the Dutch "audio inventing" scene, by age nineteen he had made contact with that important Amsterdam institution, the "Center for Electroacoustic Music", CEM - one of the oldest institutions in Holland to systematically focus on the creation and support of this type of music, and which has helped to establish a highly creative environment in which individual artists can meet and find a level of professional and technological support which they could only dream of under private circumstances.

The impetus which Arno received from the Center for Electroacoustic Music was relatively central to his further development as a composer of acoustic works. It was here that he first encountered names such as Brian Eno, Einstürzende Neubauten, Laurie Anderson, Adrian Sherwood/Tackhead, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV.

It is also quite likely that it is thanks to this encounter that Arno has since the beginning been aesthetically closer to the approach to music usually associated with dance clubs, the DJ scene and experimental electroacoustic music. Like every musician who has set out on an "audio search", in his compositions he has never limited himself to he relatively closed world of electronic technobeat. His music is constantly hovering in a difficult-to-define space between, on the one hand, art (literally research) projects in theater, site-specific and audio installations, and the world of remixes and club DJ projects on the other.

Listening to his compositions we can clearly hear a relatively personal sonic atmosphere which for the most part is formed by a series a smaller acoustic events, snippets of human speech, telephone conversations and automatic telephone machines. Almost all "ingredients" - as Peeters himself remarks - are a kind of "microcomposition" all their own, which - torn out of their original context - help to form the beginnings of a new audio organism.

In the end, this May premiere composition is no different. Snippets of conversations, foggy and highly readable remembrances, lighting-fast penetrations into a unique ambient sound - we find all this in the acoustic composition entitled "Fossil Sounds, Memory Mining". Though it was written by a Dutch artist, it offers us the chance in Czech to enter into a sonic jungle of Kladno mine workers' remembrances - into an environment typical for this region. And it is indeed remarkable to submit to this acoustic recording, this strangely objective piece, which exists in the realm between two languages, two cultural traditions.