Room Pieces

by Michael J. Schumacher
XI records, New York, 2003
2 Audio CD-ROMs, 75'43" and 72'52", $13.00
XI 127
Distributor website: http://experimentalintermedia.org/index.shtml.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

The first CD presents just one long recording of 'Room Piece', a project that has been going on since 1994, in which Michael Schumacher uses elaborate mathematical algorithms to explore the auditory structure of space. This is number XI from about 15 instances of 'Room Piece', and each time the computers plays a different but recognisable composition due to the interplay of random choices within strict limits. Even from this limited 2-d representation of what actually is conceived as a 4-d spatial experience, the listener gets a clear image of what Schumacher is trying to do. By gradually shifting and moving not only the position of the sound but also its internal structure, its texture, its dynamics and its timbre, he literally turns the ear towards the walls, the corners, the ceiling and beyond, to the outside of the room, where its lengthening perspective almost fades into nothingness. Here at last is a composer who has no horror vacui and who doesn't simply stack haphazardly chosen samples to create some crude kind of emotional ambience or artificial enthusiasm or who crams every nook and corner with useless effects or tiresome beats. Quite on the contrary, he carefully builds interior and exterior architectures that have the potential to coincide in the minds' ear to create an awareness of space in all its variations of light and dark, opaque and translucent, smooth and rough, sinuously organic and geometrically straight.

Technically, Room Piece is built from small cellular units such as piano arpeggio's, modular clusters, birdlike cries and short stretches of white noise. Each returns in numerous disguises with changed pitch and amplitude, its appearances governed by a small set of rules that are programmed into the computer. The temporal and dynamic structures are calculated by means of a set of density functions and a series of prime numbers to avoid exact reoccurrences of chance superpositions. Silences are treated as building blocks in the same way as the sounding elements. Thinking of the cells as (con)structural elements of a physical room, the silences in between their presentations are the equivalent of the empty spaces of a room, a corridor, a garage or a great hall. Don't take the analogy any further, because there is no literal translation of physical space into auditory sound: after all, this is no cheap remake of what Alvin Lucier did already in the seventies. (Lucier made an existing room 'hearable' by using its acoustic properties.) With and through these constructive principles, and the carefully selected cells, Schumacher succeeds in creating a fascinating, surprising and enchanting composition, resulting in a genuine intellectual and aesthetic experience.

The second CD has four pieces. 'Piece in 3 Parts' from 2002 uses two 30-second samples of violinist Jane Henry improvising and a 40-second sample of percussionist Tim Barnes playing the gong. The material is used and reused to create an overall narrative impression of different spaces rather than an exploration of one environment.

'Still' (two versions on this CD) can be described as a depiction of a single spot in time and space. It is an inward-looking, serene and quiet micromosaic of quasi-atomic sounds, interrelating without interacting, motionlessly moving through their own existence. (Don't get me wrong, there certainly is no metaphysical or meditative intention in this music. No New Age vagueness or pseudo-spiritual blah blah——just sounds concentrating on what they are best at: sounding in time.) The fourth track, 'Untitled' is a somewhat similar piece but uses modulated sinewaves as its material.

Michael Schumacher developed his art in and for his New York galleries Studio Five Beekman, now closed, and Diapason. Essentially, it is in this kind of environment the music should be heard and experienced. I can easily imagine that I would walk into the gallery, get wrapped in and transported by the music and end up in an adjacent room, sipping a glass of something refreshing to synchronize with the hectic pace of the outside world not realising that the few moments inside the music were more than an hour in city time. So who says we are living our lives to fast?