The Asterina Project
for voice and strophonion, flutes (Sabine Vogel) and contrabass clarinet (Theo Nabicht)—three video excerpts from a Berlin-based project to explore the method of live sampling in the context of music improvisation recorded at the Vivaldisaal Berlin (Initiative Neue Musik) on 26 April 2016
According to the German site of Wikipedia, Asterina is a starfish with five short arms. By analogy, due to the five sound sources of the project, i.e. the voice, flute, contrabass clarinet and strophonion whose stereo sound image is disseminated by two loudspeakers, the musicians and loudspeakers are set up, from the bird's eye perspective, imitating the shape of an Asterina.
The sound and music created is supposed to stay in the acoustic realm as opposed to be amplified. For reasons of clarification it should be mentioned that the two woodwind players are not amplified at all. The microphones, as seen in the video documentation, are set up only for the live recording purposes as described above. The same applies to the voice.
The motivation for this project is, through music improvisation, to field-test the strophonion for the practice of live sampling others than myself. This is a practice that I haven't applied until then, but planned to do so with the performers of the vocal ensemble Auditivvokal a few months later in Dresden. Apart from being experts in improvising, the musician to work with should be curious as well as patient since technical issues are very likely to occur. I also informed the musicians in advance that this technique implies that, during the process of playing, I will record their sound material whenever the material interesting enough for me to work with and to further develop. For all these reasons, I invited musicians that I have already been collaborating with in previous, different projects in Berlin. I wanted to experiment with two musicians to work with two sound sources to gain a sound image in stereo, one recorded to the left, the other to the right channel.