Austrian sound artist Robert Schwarz here with an excellent cassette tape Stridulations 1-14 (SUPER PANG PANG 21). I think the end-product here is mostly electronic music (very severe music), but the starting point appears to have been field recordings of insect life, and a study of same, in particular the calls and communications these creatures make by rubbing their legs and other body parts.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Schwarz’s deep knowledge of the insect world equalled or surpassed that of any given entomologist. His interest has been to use these sounds, and these patterns, as a template for his synthesised sounds, generating this intriguing series of 14 short episodes of abstraction. It’s possible field recordings have ended up in the final mix too, but the process that’s relevant is learning from nature and overlaying it on the world in a new and exciting artistic form. He did much the same, I’d venture to say, on Double Negative for Gruenrekorder which we noted in 2018 – it was all about using the inner logic of nature as his compositional score, albeit the source material in that case was more general geographic and landscape studies, retrieved from many diverse parts of the world.
Here on Stridulations 1-14 he has concentrated his focal point and energies on a much smaller target, at all times informed by his study of “entomological communication”, to use the phrase of F. Hudson here. Hudson also remarks that the finished result “invites…fresh perspectives on the relationships between humans, animals, machines.” (01/11/2024)