Story: 11/29

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Ejnar Kanding / Frank Bretschneider

Auxiliary Blue

Dacapo Records, 2013

Electronic reflections

Frank Bretschneider and Ejnar Kanding took an experimental approach to co-creating the pieces on Auxiliary Blue. They swapped music and reinterpreted each other’s work to make new sound compositions that combine both acoustic and electronic approaches.

Ejnar, Cecilie Rosenmeier from Dacapo and I met and discussed the music together. Ejnar described the two very different musical approaches between himself – with his classical academy training – and Bretschneider, an East German autodidact brought up on pirate radio. He talked about how the collaboration shaped the music. We came up with some descriptions that should inform the graphics: Unity. Beauty. Mirroring. Magical sound. Flow and slow transitions.

I started out trying to somehow show the classical world reinterpreted by the electronic. Initial explorations included looking at ‘glitches’: visual mistakes created by technology itself, like the pixelated lines in photographs caused by corrupted memory cards.
I realised, though, that this was a quite one-sided approach as the electronic was also being reinterpreted by the acoustic in these works. I started on another route, looking at things connecting and meeting each other. I found my way to satellite images of landscapes showing geographical borders. Going through NASA’s amazing archive of images, I came across a photograph of polar mesospheric clouds (rare ice clouds) taken from space. This image grabbed me, with the blue sky caught between the darkness of earth and the darkness of space.

I reflected the image so that the sky area became a strange long blue tube and the clouds began to look like water ripples. For me, this tube represented the mirroring and the flow between the two artists. I reversed the graphic’s colours for the inside of the CD and repeated the tube, mirroring it once again to elongate it further. Opposites meeting, unifying and connecting. Bretschneider’s approval of the design came in an email:
‘It’s exactly what I had in mind: clear, abstract and minimal as the music is.’

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