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Konrad Boehmer: Aspekt (excerpt; 1966-68)
From the album Acousmatrix V: Konrad Boehmer
Born in Berlin in 1941, Konrad Boehmer was trained as a composer in Cologne, working at the WDR studio for electronic music from 1961-63 and receiving his PhD from the University of Cologne in 1966. Shortly thereafter Boehmer relocated to Amsterdam, where he has remained since. Aspekt was created in the years 1966-68 at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, whose director, fellow German expatriate Gottfried Michael Koenig, had recently installed a state-of-the-art system of analog synthesizer components. (Boehmer had studied under Koenig back in Cologne.) Another German composer, Roland Kayn, also worked at the Institute of Sonology around this time, although his music took a much different direction from that of Koenig and Boehmer.
Like the Italian composer Luigi Nono, Boehmer was a committed Marxist who rejected the notion that a politically engaged form of art must be conventional and accessible. Instead, Boehmer pursued the Adornian utopia of a social critique through aesthetic construction. The music, in its violence, chaos, and rupture, mirrors the contradictions of a false reality, and in this act of negation it holds out the promise of a transfigured world of beauty and truth. Aspekt is dedicated to the North Vietnamese martyr Nguyen Van Troi.
In addition to his compositional work and political activism, Boehmer is a tireless advocate of experimental music. He curated the Acousmatrix series in which this album, a collection of his music, appeared as Volume 5. The series has since been re-released as a 9-CD boxed set entitled Acousmatrix: History of Electronic Music, which offers a fascinating, if highly idiosyncratic, phonographic tour of the genre.
Played 51 time(s).
June 10, 2011, 12:00am
