CHAIRS, BAMBOO, SUNRISE, SUNSET

When I went to Rümlingen in November 1996 for a meeting, I had a fixed concept in my head: an electro-acoustic piece that basically consists of two complementary sound "walls" that shift against each other over the course of 4 hours in such a way that they cancel each other out at sunset and dissolve into a contourless noise. The reverse at sunrise: noise becomes two "colored" spectra.
However, the moment the Hornwiese was chosen as the location, my concept began to crumble. It would have meant putting huge loudspeaker systems on a green meadow. I didn't want that.

So I thought about using cassette recorders. Lots of cassette recorders. For example 36 (36 is the square of the solar number 6). Each recorder should have a single stationary sound that changes slightly from device to device. The slow shifting of the sound intended in the original concert was now to be experienced by the audience through walking. Then I thought about suitable pedestals for the recorders and decided on chairs.

On December 31, 1996, at minus 15 degrees Celsius, I did a test outside Berlin with 6 chairs and 6 recorders. I essentially wanted to check the behavior of the sounds outdoors and the distance between the chairs.

It took me a few days to admit to myself that the moment BEFORE I put the recorders on the chairs was the better one. The recorders flew out, the chairs stayed.

The bamboo had been added shortly before. It could rustle quietly in the wind. But there's also a very special wind that I'm after and that the bamboo could catch - with a lot of weather luck: Especially in summer, when the weather is fine - on which the whole project is largely dependent - there is absolutely no wind at the moment of sunset/rise. The blackbird can then be heard very loudly. However, about an hour before sunrise and after sunset, a gentle cool breeze comes from the direction of the sun. When the wind starts to blow in the evening, the blackbird is also silent, and in the morning it may be woken up by it. I have spoken to several meteorologists about this wind phenomenon. They had never heard of it before. A large number of my acquaintances, however, seem to know about it.

That's why the row of 6 bamboo plants is at right angles to the direction of the (imaginary?) "solar wind".

The whole set of chairs and bamboo is positioned differently for sunrise and sunset. The straight part of the chair line, interrupted by a semi-circular curve, is directly aligned with the local sunset/sunrise point. The curve itself is there to turn the line into a path, something that partially diverts attention from the alignment to the situation of walking down it.

The renunciation of “active” sounds (the mutation from sound piece to listening piece) will allow the piece to be all the more permeated by the sounds produced around it by birds, musicians and audience. Also spatially, some chairs can be placed very close to other activities on the Hornwiese.
		
As a reference to this environment, it can be read that each individual chair continuously changes its orientation as a listening point. If you stand behind each of the 36 chairs in turn from east to west, you will have turned around your own axis 1 1/2 times. The two straight sections each describe a convex half-turn that faces the day; the concave semicircle faces the night (or the bamboo).
However, the chairs are linked to another reference that is now specifically aimed at the tired audience: They can sit on them!

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Translated with DeepL.com (free version)