[01] Slávo Krekovič: Kurzwellen mit Fragezeichen

The composition has been freely inspired by “processual” work of Karlheinz Stockhausen Kurzwellen. It exists in various versions and is based upon a concert improvisation using material that has been taken from shortwave radio broadcast.

Messages broadcast on various wavelengths into the whole world – from the clearly recognizable signal of the distant radio stations to the mysterious world of coded satellite communication and other technological devices – are used to go off forever while their parallel coexistence will never be repeated. But then again it is possible to capture them and use them in various ways.

The basis of the composition has been the research of radio spectrum by means of modern tools (so-called software defined radio). The “radio signal” which is broadcast on various frequency bands is subject to a series of transformation, and consequently returns back on air, enriched now by synthetically generated structures.

The complexity of modular analogue synthesis and the unpredictability of radio waves complement one another in the sound stream, where composition and improvisation fuse within one world, and so do the analogue as well as the digital, the decision of man and the machine – the moment of “right here, right now” in which there is place for both elements of order as well as for surprising coincidences.