concert for duo accordion & live electronics

    

Dutch tour 2009: November Music, STRP Art&Technology, Museum De Pont, Cross-Linx, Museum Van Bommel Van Dam

Shunt London Bridge, London UK 2009

With every breath of air, you exchange something with your surroundings. It’s the most intimate, direct and immediate way of communication with the world around you. This is the concept Air Sensible is evidently based on. It’s a project by composers Rob van Rijswijk and Jeroen Strijbos in cooperation with accordion players Pieternel Berkers and Renée Bekkers (the Toeac duo).

'removing the borders between the electronic and acoustic'

This cooperation is based on the exchange of information and sound material. Air Sensible is a spatial work wherein the electronic sounds are created on the spot through the music played by the accordionists. As in the act of breathing, what is taken in is retained, transformed and then, in a different form, returned; and there are points where the two worlds merge into each other, removing the borders between the electronic and acoustic.

Once again, the accordion proves to be one of the most versatile acoustic instruments, both in a melodic and incidental sense. You can make it whisper and scream, shudder, dance and cajole; you can make it breathe with a sigh.

In the right hands - controlled by the right thoughts - an electronic system is an extremely delicate instrument. You can use it to explore what happens around you, record that, manipulate it and then reintroduce it so that the original sound source and the sound produced form asymbiotic relationship - in this way creating a new being. As you can make sounds circulate through a room using electronics, you can similarly make accordions run rings around a centrally positioned audience.

This is what happens in Air Sensible, a spatial musical experience full of contrast, mood variations, to sounds of a fragile beauty, but also with overwhelming power.

Here you can download the graphic score for this spatial piece