CD – Gruenrekorder

Already in the beginning of the eighties the Kraftwerk, maybe little aware of this huge anticipation, promised that, pushing a special button, a little electronic calculator might play a short melody. Actually, the theme of the music machines is a suggestion that totally precedes contemporary, since the first proofs of music automatons date back to Third Century B.C. We need to get to 1970 and to the warnings of Alvin Toffler to imagine times and a daily life that is closer to us. The American sociologist claimed that the future often “arrives too soon” and even “in the wrong order”. He was so right, that now, in full-blown post-modernity, the idea that machines can satisfy our primary needs rightly seems to us like a naive dream. If the future has already come and just passed, The Frankfurter Hannes Seidl tries now to question what has left of the solemn hope that everybody might be able to make music. “Free the machines”, this is the answer, with the explicit invitation to pass from the virtuosity to an “aware listening”, being honored – we don’t know with how much critical sense and with how much irony – to go beyond the society of work and recovering time and energy to dedicate to the good, pleasant, and sublime things of the life. Seidl’s project has the form of a sort of robot radio drama, an only track lasting more than 40 minutes, with automized and electronic sounds mixed with fragments of a conference speech by the philosopher and political scientist Michael Hirsch. There are many computers software able to generate the sounds Seidl used, other among the existing ones more or less do the same things and it’s necessary to be a valid musician and scholar to be able to have some quality results, because everything is anyway based on a choice, a conceptual elaboration, that is not all the result of automatisms. If Hirsch makes us think of how much in a hyper-capitalist society the human work is being more and more obsolete, Hannes Seidl make us aware of the conceptualism of the historic avantgarde being already at the end. Everything became irremediably faster, optional from a range of pre-determined choices and derivative from what are the settings of a device. So, this accelerating thrust, powered by a disposable logic and by a short-term mentality, will unavoidably see a lot of people on the other barricade’s side, while not a blind resignation or a blind resistance to the use of the “machine” might be more useful instead. If we try to remember the theories of Toffler, “a whole series of creative strategies to selectively shape, divert, accelerate or decelerate change” would be needed. We must give Seidl full credit for the excellence of the sound sequences and for questioning such important matters.

 

Hannes Seidl – Befreit die Maschinen