carousel 1–4
The carousel starts moving, accelerating gradually, and with each rotation gets faster and faster. Snippets of music fly towards the riders; fragmented sounds that are here one moment and gone the next. Our brain tries to fill in the missing parts. Everything is spinning at such a mind-boggling speed! We fall into a kind of trance … until the ride comes to an end. The earth revolves, and we revolve with it, while we press the “fast forward” button. We try to perceive and understand everything, but we fail, because everything is going too fast. This is why we can only register fragments. A reflection of our society?
Music is usually consumed head-on or in surround sound, via headphones etc. Here, the listener moves around the sound source: four different channels – four different sounds. There are superimpositions, repetitions, stretches of silence. The challenge here was to find adequate synthetic and natural sounds that work perfectly well together and individually and seem interesting and complex. It required a lot of experimentation to come up with an original work that could fascinate the riders; that at the beginning seems abstract but bit by bit produces a complete picture. Or is it just an illusion?
Assimilation Process
Stefan Senf, born in 1977, had an early interest in every kind of electronic music. He started out by working as a DJ, experimented with a turntable and tape loops he generated himself and was constantly recording music off the radio. This strongly influenced his musical approach and eventually resulted in his becoming part of the Radio Buschfunk crew. In 1995 he produced and released his first two recordings on vinyl, co-ran the record label Brutal Chud until 2008 and set up Suburban Trash Industries in 1998. So far, Senf has played and produced anything from hardcore to broken beat, breakbeats, digital hardcore, noise, experimental, breakcore, ambient/drones, and electronica. Recent projects include a dark ambient/drones live-set at the Royal Opera of Wallonia in Liège, soundtracks for installations and short films by the artist Markus Draper, Orkester Kubiczek (in collaboration with the electronica producer Echology), and Assimilation Process, among others.