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Ulrich M​ü​ller - Function X

from alphaville | JLG | compilation by various

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Starnberg 24.11.2018


I am a huge fan of Jean Luc Godards work.
When I saw „Nouvelle Vague“ (1990) for the first time, it was especially the soundtrack with all these layers of different voices, ambient noises and music which blew me away. It sounded to me more like a radioplay than the soundtrack of a movie.

Therefore I used for this piece almost exclusively little snippets from the soundtrack. The most of them are heavily processed. There is only one sound which is not from the movie. It comes from an interview which Godard gave about „Nouvelle Vague“ in 1990. In this Interview he mentioned the term „la nature des choses“, which is also an intertitel of the movie itself. These words with
Godard´s own voice appear in the piece unprocessed but cutted and separated.

The title of the piece comes straight from the movie. There is a scene were an actor speaks about composition. In this context he mentiones a „function x“. The piece ends with these words.

I had a vague idea, how the piece should sound: strong percussive accents, layers of noisy sondfields with some tonal colouration and concrete sounds like thunder, water, machines, a barking dog, birds, voices: an interplay between artificial sounds and sounds of nature, like I had heard it in the soundtrack of the movie, but now in an extreme condensed and sharpened way.

The process was then more a „sculptural“ kind of work. I used a lot of plugins and programs to shape the sounds untill I achieved the soundqualities I was looking for.

Time compression played a major role in the preparation of the material.

Next was extreme transient shaping, filtering and noise gating. This helped to achieve the percussive soundqualitites.

Some sampels have been imported in HOFA´s IQ-Reverb as impuls responses in order to shape the sound of other sampels (intermodulation) and to extend them to soundfields.

Spectrogramms of sampels have been imported in „Metasynth“ for further processing.

Other tools were:

Ina Grm tools

Soundtoys: Decapitator, Devil Lock, Echoy Boy

MeldaProduction: MGranularMB, MFreqShifterMB, MRingModulatorMB, MRhythmizerMB

Ulrich Müller/Bio
Soundartist, Sounddesigner, Composer

Born in 1957
Earlier life: Rock musician (Guitar)
Later: studies of musicology,
Student of Josef Anton Riedl´s
Musique concrete, soundart, sound installations
Workshops about computermusic with Clarence Barlow
Guest artist at ZKM
Co-Founder of the composers collective 48nord ( HYPERLINK "http://www.48nord.de/"www.48nord.de)
Music for theatre, ballett, movies
Improvised music
Collaboration with George Lewis (among many others)
Curator of the t-u-b-e sound art gallery
More than 100 radio features about contemporary music
Radioplays
Audio engineer and sounddesigner for movies
Return to musique concrete

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from alphaville | JLG | compilation, released December 3, 2018

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