In the famous composition »4’33”« by the American composer John Cage, there is nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds. The pianist leaves the keys untouched. Cage was not primarily interested in provoking his audience with a novelty piece. Instead, the sounds of the concert hall itself – the coughing and murmuring of the audience, creaking chairs, the muffled noise seeping in from outside – become the central elements of the composition. »4’33”« shifts attention to what usually seems insignificant. A similar approach underpins Interstitial Spaces, a listening piece by the Austrian composer and percussionist Martin Brandlmayr (Radian, Polwechsel).
On his first release for Jan Jelinek’s label Faitiche, Brandlmayr collages brief fragments of music recordings, television commercials, films and field recordings into a vast musique concrète patchwork: a classical orchestra tuning up, a ship’s foghorn, human voices, the crackle of a vinyl record as the tonearm reaches the run-out groove. Music and interference noises operate on the same level of meaning. Whether certain fleeting passages register as noise or as hardcore techno is ultimately left to the listener’s imagination.
