Robert Schwarz
Stridulations 1-14
Through solitary chirps and roaring synchrony, insects and arthropods communicate through “stridulations”, diverse calls created by rasping friction between two chitinous body parts. On ‘Stridulations 1-14’, Vienna-based sound artist Robert Schwarz presents a speculative resynthesis of such calls in simultaneity with ethological field recordings of real-world insect life. A continuation of themes introduced with Schwarz’s previous release, ‘Clear Cues’ (ETAT, 2022), and partly based on a 2023 co…
Double Negative
Double Negative follows the path that Robert Schwarz has pursued with The Scale of Things. Field recordings render the core and compositional starting points around which modular synthesizers are built to complex structures that resemble nature’s contingency as their inner logic. Nature and electronics merge to compositions that reveal uncanniness and strangeness in the heart of the world as well as in ourselves. However, where The Scale of Things provoked existential threats and feelings of bei…
The Scale of Things
In The Scale of Things Robert Schwarz relies on evocative and enveloping patterns, with strong explorations of natural environments. The implications of the field recordings are given room to develop, but this is balanced with musicality and a pre-arranged structure. Seven tightly worked compositions reverberate here with a particular and abstract essence that is not easy to decipher.Distantly rooted in musique concrète, ”The Scale Of Things” discloses an uncanny, multilayered sonic universe of …