Reading the technical and theoretical background to this release is enough to put anyone’s head in a spin. To boil it down, Kanal GENDYN is a soundtrack, composed to accompany the 1992 film ‘Kanal Video’, which was released without a score. But rather than use conventional instrumentation, Haswell & Hecker decided to record the soundtrack in real-time, and to utilise the principles of abstract sound synthesis to generate ‘sound out of nothing’. These constantly mutating wave-forms are a peculiar and unique characteristic of GENDYN. On top of that, they played through two stereo feeds that were crossed to create quadrophonic sound.
While my copy only contains the stereo mix that appears on the vinyl release, with the full quadrophonic mix only being available on the audio-only DVD version, the effect remain quite bewildering.
An endless succession of hums, drones and buzzes supplemented with occasional blasts of static and distortion, it occasionally sounds like a heavy engine, sometimes like the rotary engine of a light aircraft passing overhead – others, a whole fleet of Spitfires – then it’s a giant hornet, followed by a whole swarm of the things and they’re seriously angry. The sounds funnel through the listener’s auditory system and directly into the psyche.
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If it sounds like torture, well, for many listeners it probably would be. But it’s also a fascinating experiment in tonality, and when there are multiple tones, pitches and volumes of buzz chorusing simultaneously, it has the capacity to really affect the listener’s equilibrium. Herein lies the strength of this recording: it’s good to be challenged. I suspect that experiencing this hour-long piece with the film’s visuals – which take the form of a journey through Zurich’s sewerage system by means of a remotely controlled maintenance vehicle rigged with a video camera – would be truly mind-blowing.
Haswell & Hecker Online
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