From the W1555 Buurtkrant November 2024, by Gerwin
So, how did you get into music?
When I was younger I dove into the free-party scene in Austria. Like organized raves. In the beginning I was mostly into techno and all kinds of styles of techno, but at some point for me it became a bit too limited. So, we started also doing performances during the parties. Like shows, we were doing visuals, trying to improve the visual characteristics of those parties.
What age was this?
Starting from 16 till 26 or something.
Ok, so this was also probably when you started going to art-school?
Yes, at the end of it. I was 23 when I went to art-school.
So, at that moment you already went into the direction of performance?
Yes, exactly, performance and experimenting with sound. All kinds of sounds, like field recordings and stuff like this. But in this rave scene there was not much space for this.
Yes, people just want to party and rave, right? Although, they probably appreciated the performative aspect?
Yes, definitely. When we did parties in these old warehouses, we took some rooms and made installations there, experimenting with the architecture.
So, you said you started to experiment with sound. Did you still have the idea that you wanted to make music? Or did you already approach it more out of an artistic process?
Yes, exactly, I was approaching it more from an artistic point of view.
I had already some friends who were at art-school, and so I also wanted to experiment and go towards that direction, so I left the beats behind.
But now, at this moment I am trying to implement the beats back into my work again, I guess because that is where it came from.
The music you mean?
Yes, like the elements of techno music.
Could you tell me a bit more about one of your projects?
I could tell you a bit about the longest project that I have been working on so far, about 10 years. It focuses on the audibility of satellite-signals. I was studying at the Piet Zwart Institute at that time, doing an exchange. Me and a fellow student, we were always trying things out, experimenting. Once, we stumbled upon DVB-T USB sticks, originally designed for watching digital TV and listening to FM radio. But hackers managed to write alternative drivers, expanding their capabilities to receive a wider range of signals, including those higher-frequency ones used by satellites. We experimented with capturing data from weather satellites. These spacecraft circle the Earth multiple times daily, acting like scanners that take pictures of the planet's surface and transmit them as encoded audio. We could receive these signals and decode them into images, essentially getting a selfie from space.
You did that? The sound can be translated into an image?
Yes.
So we improvised an antenna, from wire and stuff, climbed up on the roof of the Piet Zwart, stood there in the ice cold and nothing happened.
So we were like, ok, that is weird, maybe the antenna doesn’t work? So we went down again and figured out that the satellite we tried to track was not ‘alive’ anymore. But, we found out there were still 3 active ones floating around, and the next day we managed to capute one. We didn’t do much with this information, at that time. But it did kind of stayed in the back of my head.
Later, when I came to study at the conservatory at The Hague, The Institute of Sonology, I needed to propose a master research, so I proposed to research how to use satellite signals in experimental music, and so the whole idea revived.
First I was mostly focused on these weather satellites, they are very well documented, you can find a lot of information about them online, but at a certain moment, all their signals sounded the same. No variation in the beeps. They became boring to me, but then I remembered this old satellite we couldn't catch. The one that wasn’t in use anymore. I began researching these so-called ghost satellites and discovered that many of these old satellites from the 1960s and later are still orbiting the Earth. After being decommissioned, some of them mysteriously reactivated and started randomly transmitting data.
So, they don’t have any information that we need, but still they are sending information?
Yes! And then I dug deeper and deeper and found lots of interesting stories and wrote my thesis about this.
But your question was also focussed on experimental music?
Yes, I developed a performance for my graduation. An hour long lecture performance. I collected a lot of sounds and turned them into collages or sound experiments, which I arranged in an hour long piece.
And I wrote a text. My experiences of every time I went out to capture satellites, like a diary. documenting the locations, conversations with passersby and so on. Those ghost satellites are also not so easy to catch. It took me a couple of months to get little snippers of information from them.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but how do you know it's a ghost satellite?
All the satellites, all moving objects around the world are being tracked, so you can follow them in a onlinedatabase. And then you know when it will pass by and you try to catch it.
You hold up your antenna and try to be lucky.
During the time of those first generation satellites, there were no phone towers or wifi-signals that create this cloud of signals like today, that satellites have a really hard time penetrating through. The signals of those old satellites are very weak, they have very weak transmitters. So they have it difficult to penetrate through this heavy cloud of signals.
So now when you go out to try and catch a satellite signal, it is interfered by other radio signals, like your phone, wifi and other radio signals.
Which makes it very interesting, but also very difficult at the same time.
It is a very rich soundscape to capture sound in (the ones you want). They are all sounds which I can not produce with my synthesizer. And it has also all the stories and history imprinted in those signals. For instance the distance it traveled and the energy that went through the ionosphere. So, the sound gets loaded with additional things, next to the sound itself.
And then you process these sounds? You use them for soundscapes and installation?
Yes, and I use them in the performance in which I talk on top of the soundscape and tell the stories from the diary.
The sound by itself is hard to grasp. If you don’t know what is going on it could be just noise, but the narrative on top explains everything. Not in an explanatory way but in a storytelling way.
Is that important? That people understand what they are hearing?
Yes, because it will be also understandable for people that are not into sound and don’t know or realize what is going on.
So it is conceptual, but not too conceptual, otherwise it is difficult to understand.
Exactly!
The topic can get very quickly very complex. That is also why, next to these performances and installations, I also do workshops, or bike rides, where we make antennas and learn how to capture satellites. So, it is a very broad project, with many different ways to present it.
Is it still going on?
Yeah!
You call it capture satellites?
The whole process I call signal hunting.
It sounds like fishing to me.
Yes, it could be like that. Like calming. Sometimes you sit outside alone, waiting for the signal.
And the performance aspect, is that something you like to do?
I like the performing the most.
I tried to make an album out of the project, but I enjoy more the focus on the performance.
To work towards something like that. I like deadlines. If I have to create an hour long piece for a performance it is not a problem, but to work on an hour long piece for an album is for me very difficult.
And are you going back to produce music again?
Hmm, well it is always in the back of my mind. Like at Varia, at the Extratonal events. I am a host and d-jay there.So, that kind of things still interests me. But also approaching the d-jaying in an experimental way. Trying to mix experimental pieces, sound pieces in a certain way. That is also a challenge, but a nice challenge too! This could be Jazz, experimental Jazz, experimental HipHop, field recordings. All these kinds of genres actually combined. And that is an interesting challenge.
How does that work?
Hmmm, with improvisation of course. Hahaha...
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