A portrait by Seppo Gründler & Johanna Moder (2018). Language: Deutsch

Text by Solar Winds, Milena Meller, 2018

At the end of a railway line lies a station called Seestadt. From there, you reach Sonnenallee, which leads to the place where Elisabeth Schimana will perform her piece "In die Sonne". It's hot at the end of Sonnenallee, which opens into a large construction site. At the edge of this site stands a simple hall where the electronic music festival is taking place, and Schimana is opening it. People are lying on the ground, surrendering to the music. The piece "In die Sonne" begins very quietly. Clouds have gathered into a dark front; something is banging loudly against the wall outside. Later, Elisabeth Schimana will rave about how beautifully these disturbances blended with her composition. The sun's vibrations fill the dark space, making it vibrate more as Schimana layers in more low frequencies.

Soils, Roots, Paths: In the context of her Virus series, Schimana speaks of the fertile ground on which the project was able to grow. For Virus, the listening experience of a performance of Iannis Xenakis's Terretektorh (1965/66) was a trigger. Schimana also cites her ongoing collaboration with Ö1 Kunstradio. The ideas of musique concrète, developed by Pierre Schaeffer, are also "one of the roots" of her work.

Her background is reflected in her educational path: she took singing lessons and attended the course in fundamental harmonic research at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts, where she studied electroacoustic and experimental music. She completed studies in ethnology and musicology at the University of Vienna, as well as composition and computer music at the IEM in Graz. Important periods were her experiences in Moscow, where she immersed herself in the theremin at the Theremin Center. Her research-oriented approach is manifested in the founding of the IMA Institute for Media Archaeology in 2005, which she heads.

Bodies, spaces, notations. Elisabeth Schimana is one of the pioneers of this field: with interdisciplinary projects, sound installations and radio works, projects in the techno context and live compositions, she has been exploring field after field since the 1980s.

Listening to Space: “Since the beginning of my work as a composer of electronic music, I have been concerned with the placement of sounds in space." In live electronic projects, Schimana explores real architectures. In on tesar (2006–08), she performs within the specific space designed by architect Heinz Tesar. She explores the space of radio within the framework of Ö1 Kunstradio. Early on, she experimented with constellations that combine radio and the internet, for example in Die Fuge (1996). In ein dorf tut nichts (2000-01), she and Markus Seidl designed an experimental setup for the social space of a small village community.

Hearing Bodies: In Obduktion (1996), Schimana works with recordings from the autopsy room. The theremin keeps its distance, forming an invisible aura around itself. The Max Brand synthesizer is a massive organism made of handcrafted connections. Elisabeth Schimana investigates its inner workings and brews organ-like masses of sound: Höllenmaschine (2009).

Listening to the Score: In the large score (2001-06), Schimana, together with Seppo Gründler, develops a score whose basic structure determines work steps in which musical material is generated. Rethinking it with Virus (from 2011 onwards), she develops the concept of an auditory score that generates a non-written live composition.

Edges, surfaces, stars: Elisabeth Schimana's music moves along the edges, in extremes. Working within the tension between concept and experiment, she translates scientific data into musical terms. Her work In die Sonne (2016) is inspired by research on solar vibrations. With a keen mind and persistence, Elisabeth Schimana creates music that implants itself in our ears.

A portrait by Nathalie Singer & Elisabeth Schimana (2017). Language: Français

How the tones come together (Sabine Sanio)

Beatriz Ferreyra (1937) comes from a wealthy Argentinian family. Raised in Cordoba, her family moved to Buenos Aires when she was twelve. Nevertheless, they continued to spend every summer together with two other families and five pianos in their large house in Cordoba. Her entire family was musical, but everyone had different preferences: her father favored Wagner, Brahms, and Chopin; her mother was interested in Debussy, Stravinsky, jazz—and always brought back the latest records from visits to her family in the USA; one aunt played Brahms, another sang tangos, and Beatriz and her brother took piano lessons.

It took her a long time to decide on music and a life as a composer. Searching for alternatives, she went to the USA at the age of 18, and finally, in 1961, to Europe, where she stayed with friends in Paris. Her parents refused to support her, and for a long time she took on all sorts of jobs, living in a small basement apartment.

Her attempts to make a living from drawing were unsuccessful, so she spontaneously seized the opportunity to study composition with Nadja Boulanger. From her, she learned the seriousness and precision of the work. But when a composer friend, Edgardo Cantón, took her to a concert by the Groupe des Recherches Musicales, she was so captivated that she gave up her composition lessons. The music reached into infinity and opened up incredible possibilities for her. She became Cantón's assistant, learning how to edit tapes and work with filters. Shortly afterward, she participated in a course by Pierre Schaeffer and joined the team that created Schaeffer's "solfège de l'objet sonore."

The road to recognition was long. During her time at the GRM, she began composing. To be independent of Schaeffer, Ferreyra left the GRM the moment she received a commission. Afterward, she did everything she could to compose: she accepted every commission and participated in every competition. Françoise Barriere and Christian Clozier, who were founding the Bourges Festival of Electronic Music, commissioned her to write a new piece after hearing her work "Medisances" (1968). She soon received a new commission every two years.

One of the central aspects of electroacoustic music is the collection of sounds. Each of her compositions has its own unique sounds; she never reuses sounds from one piece for another. With a microphone, she records animals, people, or machines: her garden and household appliances serve as sources for "Les Larmes de l'inconnu."

Equally important to her is the exploration of space, which she considers a central element of music: “For me, music is surrounding, music is like life.” She often compares large soundscapes to an orchestral score or a painting. The vast soundscapes in "La rivière de l'oiseaux" (1998/99) are based on grids generated from short, overlapping notes.

Ferreyra uses the technique of shifting perspectives in her compositions, a technique familiar to her from Pierre Schaeffer's concept of reduced listening: one perceives sound as such, not as an effect or indication of something else. She composes intuitively; she has no rules: "It either works or it doesn't." Since "Canto del Loco" (1974), anything—image, sound, color, or form—can be the starting point for her associative composing.

Following the trilogy "La rivière des oiseaux," another series of works emerged: four pieces she describes as her esoteric compositions. In "Dans un point infini" (2005), the sounds of violinist Veronika Kadlubkiewicz transport the listener to a boundless realm. "L'autre rive" (2007) originated from percussive sounds while reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead. "Un fil invisible" (2009/10) reflects her reading of C.G. Jung. "Les larmes de l'inconnu" (2011) is the final composition in this series.

A portrait by Michaela Schwentner (2016). Language: Deutsch

https://ima.or.at/de/projekt/imafiction_portrait08/

Her long-standing presence in DJ club scenes, conceptually experimental contexts, dancefloor-focused productions, and multimedia installation performances has repeatedly confirmed that Susanne Kirchmayr stands for an intelligent and outstanding interpretation of electronic music. By rejecting the common practice of splitting the creative self into project names and aliases, all facets of Kirchmayr's creative work form an artistic unity: Electric Indigo.

Electric Indigo's versatility has led them to niche scenes and groups in Vienna and Berlin, to traditional practices of stage, film, and opera, and to paradigm-breaking performances realized with forward-looking compositional techniques as sound art. Despite all these diverse forms of expression, interests, and developments, Kirchmayr never felt the need to split herself in the process. "everything I do is equally distributed between performances, working on experimental compositions, DJing, and club music."

Kirchmayr frequently employs intertextuality in her work; many of her sound art compositions and live performances are based on significant speeches or dialogue recordings. Her conceptual composition project – Barry Duffman – further develops this theme. Premiered at Wien Modern 2015, the source material for Barry Duffman consists of slick #1 pop chart hits.

In her performances, Kirchmayr developed a method of deconstructing and reassembling diverse source materials. Through her conscious engagement with space, she creates acoustic, musical, linguistic, and graphic details, and explores spatiotemporal manipulations in sound design. Another significant work is Kirchmayr's granular synthesis project MORPHEME, performed at CTM Festival 2015. The basic material for MORPHEME is a nine-second recording of a sentence by Sadie Plant: “To let noise into the system is a kind of fine art in both cybernetic terms and in terms of making music, too.”

Kirchmayr is constantly moving forward in her compositional process. "I'm totally counter-cyclical," she says, "I only go from hardware to software. I only use the computer and a few MIDI controllers, that's pretty much it."

Kirchmayr embraces the sonic aesthetics of bass and drums; the starting point for all her musical projects. While one cannot speak of a distinct sonic signature, Kirchmayr's productions are characterized by subtle moods and textures in space and time.

Kirchmayr is a veteran of the Viennese electronic music scene. Since her early days as a radio DJ in the 80s, she has explored hip hop, techno, experimental electronica, and sound art. She moved to Berlin in 1991, immersing herself in the burgeoning Berlin techno scene. Her first releases appeared in 1993 on Experimental and Disko B. In 1993, Kirchmayr founded indigo:inc recordings, while continuing to perform as a DJ in over 35 countries worldwide.

Kirchmayr has long been a fixture at panels addressing composition and performance practice within the context of social issues. Kirchmayr developed the digital network and platform female:pressure in 1998. With the goal of supporting female producers, it has evolved into an important resource encompassing a global database and network for female artists in music, with members from over 65 countries. Female:pressure received an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2009.

Regarding her future, Kirchmayr simply states that she continues to strive to reconcile her different selves. “I’m slowly reaching the point where my two main musical interests – techno on the one hand, and music that could be described as electro-acoustic/avant-garde on the other – come together and merge into a single composition.”