Iron Age is a commissioned work for the 'Game of Life' portable wave field synthesis system in Leiden/Holland.
Duration: 7:05min
Channels: 32 virtual audio channels / 192 speakers
Premiere: November 20 2010 20:45 at the STRP festival, Einhoven/Holland.
Duration: 7:05min
Channels: 32 virtual audio channels / 192 speakers
Iron Age is constructed of transformed field recordings of industrial metal parts hitting each other, robbing against each other or rolling on a stone floor plus recordings of vocal sounds created by the composer.
The aim was to build a quite haunting and evil atmosphere of some sort of big machinery, perpetuating infinitely in a non-defined fictional location. The formal design principle of Iron Age is inspired by the idea of a big clockwork; every sonic event is rotating around its own axis in space, with its own rotation speed, direction, and radius. The result is a series of complex spatial trajectories, sounds are not only projected outside the speaker ring of the WFS system but also passes thru the head of the listener inside the ring.
By dynamically placing sonic events in a virtual space, Iron Age cannot only be interpreted as a linear composition with a fixed duration but also as temporal arrangement in space, where every listening position has its own qualities and perspectives. In this regard Iron Age has more in common with a multichannel sound installation than with a concert piece.
Since the spatial movements are an integral part of the composition, a stereo recording cannot provide a good impression. The 'recording' here is a mix between a stereo recording made at the rehearsal location in Leiden, in the center of the room, and some of the source files without movement, directly from the DAW: IronAgeRough.mp3