Stefan Römer's second deconceptual album: six gun shots and an algorithm.
Deconceptual word score:
Six shots ring out in a deadly rhythm—in my memory.
For this sound piece, a sampled gunshot from the sound library freesound.org was arranged in a sequence of six in Audacity. The individual shots differ in filtering and in their relation to each other in time.
All six shots are repeated in the beginning and end. Each shot opens up a different drone, processed with the free audio software "Paul's Stretch" so that a sound(-time-space) emerges. After each drone, the previous shots are repeated, after which each last shot is stretched into another drone, six times, generating a deconstructed permutation.
One trigger for this sound piece were six gunshots which woke up Stefan Römer early one morning in winter 2006 in Munich, when two people were murdered and a child seriously injured in the street. In this project that incident resulted in an argument against the private use and ownership of weapons.
In the live performance (at Uncertain Sounds Festival, Berlin 2018), the drones were filtered differently with analog pedals, while for this album they were re-processed with different effect arrangements in Ableton Live.
Limited to 100 copies.br>
Stefan Römer (born 1960 in Katzenelnbogen, Germany) works as an artist and art theorist. He initiated the political activist art collective "FrischmacherInnen" in Cologne (1993–2000), was awarded the AdKV Prize for Art Criticism in 2000, and has held professorships at various art institutes. Since 1981, he has not only been a vegetarian, but also combines an ecological and ethical awareness in his art. In addition to his film Conceptual Paradise (2006) he developed an extensive web archive at the ZKM-website.
Stefan Römer's works are known for their deconstructivist approach to image, sound and text, combining various working methods of lense-based, time-based and performative practices. Römer uses the term "de-conceptual" to define his transmedial fusion of Conceptualism and Deconstructivism with postpanoptic, feminist and postcolonial practices. His de-conceptualization of art formulates a new kind of artistic REALsearch, by means of a multi-layered critique of prevailing discourses.
