CD – Thorsten Knaub
Thorsten Knaub – Listening Station
It’s not the first time – of course – and it won’t be the last here at Neural that in an experimental music, soundscapes or field recordings review we concern ourselves with audio productions that are somehow correlated with architectures and abandoned spaces, be they buildings or disused structures, old factories or former military bunkers. What happens to buildings, when people simply move and leave the place unused? The decay of territory and the obsolescence of technologies and social organization models today often give rise to such situations: we are not surprised, then, that the inspiration for a project like this one comes from the radar station of Teufelsberg in Berlin, a former listening center of the American National Security Agency, a set of buildings placed on an artificial hill in the Western periphery of the German metropolis. We can’t afford not to underline just how these kinds of spaces remind us that in the years after the war, technologies became an important part of the everyday life of millions of people. Thorsten Knaub – to tell the truth – is an eclectic investigator, an artist who doesn’t limit his actions to sound research, even though in the first digression of the record he seems to concentrate on the “musical” rather than the “conceptual” aspect of the operation, perhaps fascinated by the recent discovery of the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese straight flute, made of bamboo, an instrument often used in Buddhist meditation and effective, in this case, at sketching improvisational threads, iterated patterns and dreamy site-specific digressions.