Big Data is the Hamburg Decoder Ensemble's survey of music made from the endless supply of media in the digital age. The five works, all first recordings, deal in different ways with remixing, copy and paste, sampling and recycling. They are by Brigitta Muntendorf, Ole Hübner, Stefan Prins, Matthias Kranebitter and Leopold Hurt, the last a member of the group.
Decoder was founded in Hamburg in 2011 and calls itself a "band for contemporary music". It mixes electronic and acoustic instruments, works with computer techniques, multimedia and elements of pop and rock, and has played in concert halls and in clubs such as Berghain in Berlin. Three of its members are composers, so these techniques come naturally. Its line-up has included Carola Schaal on clarinet, Sonja Lena Schmid on cello, Hurt on electric zither, Andrej Koroliov on piano and Jonathan Shapiro on drums, with Alexander Schubert on sound design. The disc is a coproduction with Deutschlandfunk.
The idea grew out of the group's Big Data Weekend, a small festival it organised in 2017. As Schaal explains, Decoder commissioned eight works on the theme of remix for it, chose several for this disc, and added Muntendorf's PLAY ME back and forth (2015) for voice, ensemble and electronics. Hübner's Lied mit Chor: "Nachtigall mit Melodei" (2016-17, revised 2018), the longest piece at over eighteen minutes, adds a female vocal artist, four-channel tape and live electronics. Prins's Hände ohne Orte (2016/17) is for clarinets, percussion, prepared piano, cello and soundtrack. Kranebitter's Stack overflow: Exploiting 24 preludes (2016/17) uses bass clarinet, cello, electric zither, keyboard, percussion and electronics.
Hurt's Dissociated Press (2017), for speaking voice, ensemble and recorded material, closes the programme. Its title plays on the news agency Associated Press and refers to an algorithm that generates dummy text. The piece began in 2017 as a work in progress and grew into a multimedia cycle about art in the digital age, dealing with algorithms, data flows and the relationship between fakes and originals. For its tenth anniversary Decoder gave the first complete performance of the cycle.
CD, Wergo WER 7376 2, released in 2019, a coproduction with Deutschlandfunk.
