Musik der Zeit

Was 1951 the actual birth year of electronic music? And if so, of which one? The experimental techno album ‚Musik der Zeit‘ by SIN / Stranger In The Night is exploring these questions. It is based on the early work of the ‚Studio für elektronische Musik des WDR‘ (The Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio), which was founded in that year - the first of its kind in the world.

With ‚Musik der Zeit‘, SIN / Stranger In The Night has put the ideas, methods and techniques of the earliest days of pure and radical electronic music into a techno context. The album returns to the past to explore future manifestations of electronic (dance) music, where not instruments and their specific sound characteristics (303, 909, ARP Odyssey, Korg MS-20...) determine the results, but ideas. Self-confident as always, Stockhausen summed it up in his British Lectures: "New methods change the experience".

80% of the sounds used on the album originate from sound generators used in the WDR studio, including the drums. The remaining 20ish % are samples, which are then manipulated in a contemporary DAW context. Serial composition techniques based on number matrices were applied to the sequence of single notes and patterns. Of course, aleatoric techniques, which were undesirable at the time as well as repetition, which is not only unavoidable in techno but its very foundation, have also left their mark on the tracks. Despite the rigorous ‚serial’ methods used, it was less a matter of rebuilding, than of re-experimenting something that extremely broadened the sound horizon. The individual tracks are therefore not so much separate units, but rather different plateaus of a unified album concept which can be experienced in the 'Stream of Consciousness Mix (no. 10). It is here, that the straightforward sequenced patterns of contemporary dance rituals are rewound to a place of more intricate movement, conceived in a universe which was recorded on tape long since decayed.