{Sauraugase 4, Graz}
The building number 4 Sauraugasse has repeatedly changed owners and function in its long history. Used in the 19th century as a restaurant, it was later then rented part of a hospital and by the Medienfabrik Graz used as office, retail and warehouse space. Now it is a building with an almost emptied floor and large glass surfaces facing the street and the courtyard. There were metal doors and remnants of previous occupiers of the building like metal scraps, garbage bags, an old plotter, piles of rubble. Aside from that, there was a lot of light and sounds from outside that penetrate through the windows and into the halls. Every now and again, a church bell rang. It all has the atmosphere of a workshop – bare rooms, long reverberation times. For the composition Sauraugasse 4 27 loudspeakers where used realising a spatial sound-composition in two parts.
For the first part a seating for a maximum of 10 people had been set up at the top of the staircase. From this point the finished building sound-composition was ment to be listened to, as it was designed to be the sweet spot of the spatial composition. For a brief moment, as the sound events hover over for the listener the situation becomes very intimate. Then the occurrence disappears, vanishes in a continual repetition throughout the building’s spatial structure, tracing a line through space that gets increasingly thinner towards the end before becoming nothing more than a memory only to come back, getting closer and then vanishing again.
In the second part the same composition was played back again but this time the listeners could move freely through the building. By winding up the fixed seating the auditory experience becomes a visual. Since the audience become passersby it is now exploring the building with the eyes. Right in the middle of the nexus of moving and scaled sounds, there are pictures frozen in time, snapshots: a coffee machine, a sink, a pile of rubble, an unhinged door, a glass cell.
Premiere: August 29, 2011
Funded by the A9 (Kulturförderung) Styria and the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, University of Music and Performance Arts Graz.