Christophe Charles / i8u – Unter Den Linden / Und Transit

Christophe Charles

CD – Non Visual Objects
The timely recording of a concert by Christophe Charles at the SND Studios in Sheffield, England, in March 2009, gave birth to a performance that goes by the intriguing title, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The work evokes dimly lit environments, containing deep and disturbing breathing sounds alongside field recordings. Tormenting atmospheres, following the death of the composer’s
brother, to whom the piece is dedicated, are vividly created with faint, windy auditory emergencies, as if to exorcise the breathing difficulties of the last days of the illness. The research context of “Und Transit”, however, was realized while participating in a 3-month artist residency in Krems, Austria, between 2008 and 2009. Passages through several spaces, “which are a means to an end and are rarely treated as an end in themselves”, are the subject of speculations and personal reflections on loneliness, on the “practicality” of environments, on the estrangement from a defined conceptual set. The record explores the condition of being “in transit”, random variables and the plurality of independent life times, generating poetic and rarefied experimental harmonies.