Worlds Falling Apart — The Bowed String Instrument Esraj Amid a Demolition Scene

When working with Pamalka Manjitha Karunanayake in 2018, the two of us ended up recording in Cult Studios (Colombo, Sri Lanka). There, I audio-recorded Pamalka's rendering of some marvelous samples all of which showcasing his deep understanding of the raga charukeshi. Charukeshi is a highly ambivalent raga. As a result, the performance of a skilled player will always convey joy as well as grief, and oscillate between emotional qualities. On this December 4th 2018 none of us had any clue about the catastrophes that were in store. Nevertheless, I had field-recorded impressive sounds of some demolition machinery, tearing down an old building that had been used as an arts centre in Fulda, central-Germany. That was meant to gentrify the neighbourhood. I brought these somehow eerie recordings to my longtime colleague Bernie Rothauer in Salzburg to see what could be done with them in his Ôbaxé studio. Bernie loves to work with weird soundscapes. My then working title was "Making a Trance." This contribution comes as a post-workshop interview about how that music came into being.

Golden Hat of Schifferstadt

Four conical golden hats of the Late Bronze Age were discovered in southern Germany and western France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their users were probably members of a caste of priests or priestesses performing ceremonies linked to astronomical/calendrical knowledge. Another find discovered in central Germany, the Nebra bronze-gold disk, predates the golden hats by two to six centuries and has also been interpreted as an astronomical/calendrical ceremonial tool. From the burial location of the Nebra disk the Sun sets on the highest mountain of the Harz range, the Brocken, on the summer solstice. Here we investigate whether the burial location of the Schifferstadt golden hat also had an astronomical meaning. Our results make it possible to hypothesise that the Schifferstadt location was a natural astronomical/calendrical viewing place with the same function as several prehistoric circular enclosures, but where the natural hilly horizon of the Odenwald and the Palatinate Forest replaced the artificial horizon of the enclosures.