Florian Hecker was born in 1975 in Augsburg. He currently lives and works in Vienna. Hecker has been working with computer music, independently and in collaboration with other artists such as Farmersmanual, Russell Haswell, Shunichiro Okada, Peter Rehberg, Marcus Schmickler, and Yasunao Tone, as well as philosopher Reza Negarestani, since 1996.
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2CD
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EMEGO 256CD
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What you hear in Synopsis Seriation, Hecker's latest album with Editions Mego, draws upon current research in machine listening and music information retrieval, where the "ghosts in the machine" are unsupervised convolutional operators designed to extract auditory features from a signal. Experimental deployment of these virtual listening agents has only just begun, and Synopsis Seriation advances a general research program Hecker initiated through a series of publications, performances and installations since 2013. In A Script for Machine Synthesis (EMEGO 226CD, 2017), the third chapter in the trilogy of text-sound pieces in collaboration with the philosopher Reza Negarestani, both a resynthesized and a computer-generated voice modelled after the narrators's voice, reflecting on systems of language, automatons and chimerized synthesis. Articulação Sintetico (2017) -- a complete resynthesis of Hecker's album Articulação (EMEGO 180CD, 2014) -- features synthetic voice models of Joan La Barbara, Sugata Bose and Anna Kohler. Central to Inspection II (EMEGO 268CD, 2019) is a bespoke computer-generated voice, reciting Robin Mackay's libretto -- by means of deep neural networks and machine listening computation, perpetually crossing formal anticipations of sound analysis to the unexpected artefacts of synthesis. Synopsis Seriation does away with such staging of computer-generated speech. It dramatizes synthetic sound in all its unnamable intensities and detail by transforming four multichannel pieces Hecker produced since 2015. These have been analyzed, dissected and reconstructed utilizing information geometry, a subfield of mathematics at the interaction between statistics and differential geometry, designed by Vincent Lostanlen. His scientific work is at the forefront of the movement of computational auditory analysis out of the frequency domain model toward a more complex understanding of the auditory landscape and perceptual processing. Written and produced by Florian Hecker, 2015-2020. Information geometry and sound computation by Vincent Lostanlen. Mastering by Rashad Becker.
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CD
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EMEGO 268CD
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"Masochism is cruel because, in subverting the model, it imposes it with exaggerated severity..." --Amy Ireland
Florian Hecker's latest CD release continues his work with computational techniques for analysis and re-synthesis. In Inspection II, you hear the progressive reconstruction of original source material using algorithms based upon human hearing and designed to capture timbral characteristics of sound. As the source is iteratively extracted from featureless noise, a complex ongoing dialogue commences between formal model and empirical experience of sound. Like Charon, the boatman who ferries souls of the dead across the styx, Inspection II crosses perpetually from one bank to the other: from the formal anticipations of analysis to the unexpected artefacts of synthesis. In Robin Mackay's libretto, recited by a synthetic voice, this inspective dialogue is transferred to the introspective psychoanalytic situation, where the continual re-narration of the self creates further disturbances and transformations -- to attain a definitive image of oneself would be to face one's own death. As discussed in Amy Ireland's essay "Beside a Cold Statue" commissioned for the CD sleeve notes, this process, whose symptomatology is recognizably that of masochism, sees the coldness of the formal model subverted as Hecker's continual re-synthesis delivers up a series of harsh, tantalizing, and bewildering textures and timbres. 16-page booklet. Written and produced by Florian Hecker, 2016-17. Synthetic Voice: Christophe Veaux, CSTR, The University of Edinburgh. Liner notes: Amy Ireland. Mastering: Rashad Becker.
"Inspection II is a very particular composition which deserves a privileged position not only in relation to attempts to exhaust and remove the unknown borders of the sonic universe, but also among the various endeavors of Expanded Psychoanalysis. By transcending the unique authority of Freudian discourse, by alienating and synthesizing the dialogue of analyst and analysand, by penetrating the realm of that babble that is the obvious origin of human language and communication, designated by Jacques Lacan as lalangue, Inspection II discloses a space beyond representation, and hence beyond sense, intelligibility and significance. In order to imagine the inconceivable and unattainable unconscious of an apparently amorphous real that lies outside the structured network of reality with its mediating instances of the imaginary and symbolic orders, Florian Hecker's project suggests an all-pervading realm of sounds and noises considered as one of the purest utterances of existence. Closing the screen of the cerebral computer, psychoanalysis emerges as the hard disk's synaptic music, echoing the big bang of our psychic genesis." --August Ruhs (Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, University of Vienna)
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CD
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EMEGO 226CD
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The latest work from Florian Hecker, A Script For Machine Synthesis, is an experimental auditory drama and a model of abstraction. A Script For Machine Synthesis presents a complex simplicity that spirals in an unending manner as an audio image of the uncanny valley. It is the third chapter in a trilogy of text-sound pieces in which Hecker has collaborated with the philosopher Reza Negarestani. A resynthesized voice outlines procedure as procedure itself unfolds. The suggestive encounter with a pink ice cube is a conceptual point of departure for a scene in which linguistic chimeras of descriptors are materialized through synthetic trophies, mental props and auditory objects. Hecker presents a synthesis of the gap in the valley which the listener almost knows. The motifs Hecker has staged in the last decade - the text, the sound, the scent, the obelisk, the demon, the self, the other - all appear throughout in a thorough, rigid and formal exploration. Exeunt all human actors, A Script For Machine Synthesis is an experiment in putting synthetic emptiness back into synthetic thought.
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CD
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EMEGO 180CD
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Editions Mego is proud to release Articulação, the latest work by Florian Hecker. Articulação deepens Hecker's collaboration with Reza Negarestani, author of the libretto created for Hinge. In two distinct renderings this piece articulates a complex scene in which the two obelisks of the script -- one from the perspective of nature and one from the perspective of culture -- are recited simultaneously in an informational yet dramatic style. Hinge* features the legendary artist Joan La Barbara as its main voice and is delivered in microtonally converging pitches with sparse sample-accurate time-lags, shifts and twists. The repolarizing phrasings of Hinge recall Artaud's Theater of Cruelty as much as Beckett's minimalist narratives. Here the listener may construct a hinge, a pendulation between the right and the left obelisks; embarking upon navigation and synthesis while tracing the chimeras of nature and culture. In apparent contrast, Hinge** engages the disparate modalities of its sources, complicating any assimilation of their respective traits. With an insight on the complexities of Hecker's chimerized pieces, Robin Mackay summarizes: "According to psychoacoustical research, the brain functions that serve to identify the 'what' and the 'where' of a sound operate upon different timescales, a finding Hecker exploits to produce sequences in which the fine time structure of one voice is sheathed in the amplitude envelope of another, producing an entity that remains recognizable as a voice while being spatially delocalized and semantically scrambled, and which the listener must reconstruct as a unified yet impossible synthetic creature -- a chimera." Between these pieces, Modulator (... meaningless, affectless, out of nothing ...), reveals, in a structural and formal manner, the synthetic means of modulation and topological transformation that appear in disguise in Hinge**. In a sequence of short episodes and chronics, Modulator celebrates the notion of sound as an Immaterial. Its syntheticness and modern generation occurring as a bottom up and top down process across different scales, exciting the human mind's hallucination of objects on the basis of auditory cues, without obvious compounding of a narrative progression. Articulação is an isolated masterpiece of text, sound and synthesis. Includes a 12-page booklet. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Total running time: 79 minutes, 30 seconds.
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LP
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EMEGO 153LP
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Editions Mego is happy to announce the release of Chimerization, three vinyl editions of a text-sound piece Florian Hecker produced on the occasion of dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. For Chimerization, Hecker invited the Iranian writer and philosopher Reza Negarestani to contribute an experimental libretto, "The Snake, the Goat and the Ladder (A board game for playing chimera)," a script that has been recited by a group of speakers and recorded by Hecker in anechoic and sound-attenuated chambers: rooms designed to minimize the reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. Hecker characterizes Chimerization as a concept derived from psychoacoustic investigations on difficult-to-define areas between language and non-language, a process focusing on the decomposition of sound and synthesizing incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, in order to obtain a narration beyond immediate comprehension, which may be deciphered through repeated, "active" listening. Chimerization is available in the following languages: English (EMEGO 153LP), German (EMEGO 154LP), the mother tongue of the artist, and Farsi (EMEGO 155LP), the original language of the writer. German voices: Andreas Huyssen, Anna Kohler, Guerino Mazzola. Farsi voices: Arash Afraz, Maryam Vaziri Pashkam, Mahsa Rouhi. English voices: Gabriel Catren, Sugata Bose, Joan Jonas. All voices recorded by Florian Hecker at the Sensory Communication Group, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, except: Andreas Huyssen recorded at Hearing Science Laboratory, City University of New York; Guerino Mazzola recorded at Orfield Labs, Minneapolis. Gabriel Catren recorded by Olivier Pasquet at IRCAM, Paris. The three vinyl editions of Chimerization have been designed by NORM, Zurich and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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LP
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EMEGO 155LP
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LP
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EMEGO 154LP
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12"
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EMEGO 095EP
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3 track 12" featuring pieces produced on occasion of a Comme des Garçons HOMME PLUS fashion show held in Paris, January 2009. This could be seen as some of Hecker's most accessible work to-date, and a fine addition to any serious electronic music collection. Edition of 500.
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CD
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NEU 007CD
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Galerie Neu presents Florian Hecker's NEU CD. In apparent contrast to Acid In The Style Of David Tudor (EMEGO 094CD), this CD features three computer-generated pieces which were produced in close relation to Hecker's first exhibition at Gallery Neu in 2007 as well as a contribution for the exhibition Off The Record/SOUND ARC at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2004. NEU shifts back and forth between detail-saturated fragmentation and a near-static structuralism. "Wq Acid VII" and "Neu Ext" show evidence of Hecker's interest in the notion of the déja entendu, where the repetition of rhythmic patterns slowly densify the emission of events, further rupturing the sonic affect into a new re-structured gestalt. In "≤ Σ" constant fluctuations and ever-changing waveforms along the lines of a dynamic stochastic synthesis rupture the classic definition of "noise signal" used within the field of psychoacoustics. The last track "Yin Pitch Detection Synthesis Kissing" takes a seemingly opposite approach while re-synthesizing the recording of a garden. NEU CD comes with a 12-page booklet featuring the product photography of the original CD case design by Peter Saville: a laser-cut block of open porous foam, housed in a transparent, smoke-grey acrylic cover. Photography by Nick Turner. Mastered by Denis Blackham.
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CD
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REPH 181CD
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This is Vienna-based sound artist Florian Hecker's first full-length release on the Rephlex label. Hecker has been working with computer music, independently and in collaboration with other artists such as: Farmers Manual, Russell Haswell, Shunichiro Okada, Peter Rehberg, Marcus Schmickler and Yasunao Tone since 1996. Hecker's works emphasize the connection of the most recent as well as the most historic developments in computer music, hard- and software. Often working closely together with software engineers and scientists, his recent productions incorporate psycho-acoustic effects disorientating the listener's spatial perception in live presentations and studio works. He has been working on sound pieces commissioned by visual artists Angela Bulloch, Carsten Höller, Florian Pumhösl and Cerith Wyn Evans. Together with Russell Haswell, he is currently working on a compact disc with material recorded early 2004 during their research with the UPIC system at the Centre for Composition of Music Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX) in Paris. The eight pieces on Recordings for Rephlex were completed between 2002 and 2004. Although individual pieces have been produced for different occasions, all the recordings share concepts of sound generation on various time scales, down to the smallest sound particles. Superimpositions of multiple audio layers were not applied.
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12"
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MEGO 064EP
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"File under: Acid, Computer Music. 3 audio tracks and 6 locked grooves, 45rpm. Obscure, frenzied zigzag rhombus. Angular audio designed to dismantle perception. Florian Hecker (b. 1975 .DE) is an artist in the fields of computer music. He started making music with computers in 1996. Ever since, he has researched on mobile performance tools taking part in the first wave of Mego related concerts in 1996. This latest 2 track 12" is a fine example of just how far extreme audio has come -- electroacoustic whiplash courtesy of hypertense audio angles and intense digital disorientation. 'Pandämonium 9 Playlist' rides a manic curve with jagged edges, abrupt swoops, metallic bites and wild bass bombs -- an all out war on the senses which leaves the listener simultaneously baffled + energised. 'Stocha Acid Vlook' hijacks the senses in a torrential digital storm. A macabre buzzing drills it's way through sweeping hiss and wailing sheets of sound propel the listener through a violent and furious lysergic 4 mins 30 secs. The bubblegum patch fantasy is dead. This is computer music with attitude. It is not your run of the mill kid with software exercise in audio angst but a whole hearted love affair of the medium in a classical sense and some solid evidence as to where it can be taken in the future, which is right here and now. Lusus naturae -- an unnatural production. An end to audio -- digital decay as ecstatic vision."
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