It pleases me to bring you excerpts from a conversation with Kreng, a contemporary sound artist from Belgium. Kreng’s recent work on L’Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu has been one of great intrigue and fascination for me. I hope you can find our dialogue to be insightful to some respect:

ORBITER SIGNAL: You endorse a quote: “Noise lost the power to insult. Silence hasn’t.” In regards to this, I am immediately brought to recall a moment during L’Autopsie Phenomenale de Dieu when the sparse elements of delicate drums and a hushed voice crying open up into a brief silence. It is during this suspended chasm that the listener feels the immense weight captured in the crushing enormity of visceral cinematic realism. Can you address your feelings on the effective use of a minimalist approach with sound?

KRENG: I have noticed that silence, in contrast to ‘noise,’ is uplifting. We’re bombarded with noise the whole time: traffic sounds, blaring radios, people talking, cell-phones ringing, etc… We have become capable of blocking sound out. Silence on the other hand has become a rare item. There’s no silence to be found in a normal person’s daily life. Therefore silence feels new, unique & out of this world.
Silence has no information. In a time where there’s too much information silence has a lot to say for itself. One just needs to listen…
I was firmly struck by silence while I was listening to a recording of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. The piece consists out of singular blocks of sound separated by silences. What you actually listen to is the silence. The silence is disrupted by sound but when the sound ends the exaltation resumes. During the silences one reaches upwards, becomes curious to how the piece will continue.
When I am confronted with a noise-piece my body tends to cramp together & hunch down. Silence makes me arch my back, I move upwards & I feel my senses opening up. It would be great if people listening to my music would have the same feeling. One can only guess….I do like well-structured noise but it’s not something I wish to communicate.

ORBITER SIGNAL: You have a seamless way of incorporating found sound and field recordings into your mixes, how critical are these audio samples to your sense of musical inspiration?

KRENG: I do use field recordings & found sounds, but not as much as you would think. The basic components of my compositions are very well-chosen samples. I try to look for a certain texture that refers to a time-frame, a cultural entity, a state of mind, a technical environment. It’s important to sample a blues-guitar from a 78RPM record. Don’t try to record it yourself. It’s never say the same thing…. By combining all these different samples from various time-frames & technologies of recording you can create a environment that triggers a lot of associations in the listener’s mind. It’s not something new, you just haven’t heard it this way yet.
I also like to sample ’silence:’ static, hiss, silent parts of vinyl, the spaces between words, etc… That way I have collected a lot of surface noise that I use as the basis for a lot of my pieces. For example: the girl crying on the Chopin piece. This used to be a dictaphone-tape from an actress reading a text in a car while it was raining on the car’s roof. I told her to cry. Later I removed all the words & I was left with these beautiful sounds of a sobbing woman in a locked environment….

ORBITER SIGNAL: In what regard do you feel your record has been successful in conveying your own philosophical point of view?

KRENG: I don’t want it be easy. Not for me and not for the listener. It’s important that there’s an effort to be made. On both sides.
It needs to communicate. It cannot be a one direction consumption thing.
I had nothing predetermined when I started working on the record. Basically it’s a compilation of work that I’ve done over the last 5 years for theatre. The theatre-pieces all have their own way of saying things, so the music had to serve that. The music used to have a functional character in the theatre. For the record it’s a different affair. On the record the music needed to become autonomous. I had to shorten certain things, make it more exciting. I’ve tried to make the sounds tell a story without the narrative of any visual input. This was quite a challenge for me & I hope I succeeded in this difficult metamorphosis of my music. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder…. so I can only hope for it to work on this level…

ORBITER SIGNAL: Lastly, if one were to be witness to the autopsy of God, what would one find?

KRENG: the same as what one would find when he witnessed his own autopsy: A bag of skin, containing a lot of stuff we can’t figure out.

Image courtesy of Kreng:

Image of the extremely rare green vinyl pressing of L’Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu:

for more background information regarding Kreng research:
http://www.myspace.com/krengmusic