// Label: Weiser:Music
// Territory: World
// File under: Film-concert, Electronic

The electronic sound adaptation by media artist Marc Weiser is based on the original audio track of Dziga Vertov’s first sound film. His approach to the original is both additive and contrapuntally.

In the additive approach the original sound is maintained completely, and only supported by some subtle sounds, so the audience can experience the original’s synchronicity of image and sound. Special value is set on conserving the restored sequences, which impressively demonstrate the high musical sense of the assembled material.

For the contrapuntal approach Marc Weiser refers to S.M. Eisenstein, W.I. Pudowkin, and G.A. Alexandrow. In their manifest about sound films from 1928 they write: "Only a contrapuntal usage of the sound in relationship to the visual montage-component allows new possibilities of montage-development and montage-perfection. The first experimental work with the tone has to be directed to a significant a-synchronicity with the visual images. Only such an operation can effect the necessary concreteness, that later effects an orchestral counterpoint of visual and acoustic images."

Here Marc Weiser uses his own acoustic material, in which the neoliberal working world is partially reminiscent, and so it can also be read as comment to the original’s view on industrialisation. In the adaptation he avails himself of computer technology as vertical montage-instrument to enter the sediment content layers of the acoustic reservoir and test them for their rhizomatic capabilities.

His idea of montage is characterised by an anti-logical impetus, which swaps linear causality for aleatoric openness. This openness and the connection of additive and contrapuntal approaches empower Marc Weiser to create a transformation from of the original sound into the 21st. century.

> www.weisermusic.com