The “DARK ENERGY albums“ are a series of 4 albums created with a special method for recycling urban soundscapes into musical sound material. Each album is dedicated to another city: Singapore, Frankfurt, Munich, Augsburg. The sound spectrum of the cities as a symbiosis of engine noise and domesticated nature, architectural filters and cultural impacts turns into a fundamental element of compositional structure.
The sound materials are field recordings, recorded at various public spaces in each of the cities focussing on so-called non-places.
Associated with a striking imbalance of auditory and visual impressions, these albums question whether urban spaces – originally designed as local recreation areas – over time change into acoustic non-places.
The unique sound of this album series is based on polymorphic rhythm structures of sound waves reflecting between skyscrapers, sounds of circular saws and hammer blows spreading over the city, unique cultural and social events (like Europe’s largest building demolition to date in Frankfurt or Singapore’s Formula 1 Grand Prix) and underwater recordings of the cities‘ rivers. Especially the river works as a sort of natural band-pass-filter, that releases certain frequencies of the urban soundscapes, which are combined with sounds of ship’s propellers and flow generated noise.
The recontextualization of non-place sounds is part of this album series‘ recycling process as well as the collection of sound material, its synthetic modulation and its integration into their compositional approach.
These albums were created as part of the project CLUBbleu.