computer music, ambient music with guitar, sound experiments
I'm a guitarist and electronic composer living in Kuerten, Germany - just a mile from Karlheinz Stockhausen's home, one of the epicenters of the world's musical avantgarde.
Since the beginning of my musical life, I was never interested in conventional music. It was the new sound worlds that I was after. Starting out as a young guitarist many years ago, I was influenced not by the mainstream but by guitarists who made unusual music with their instruments. Later I took some Guitar Craft lessons with Robert Fripp (of King Crimson), played in Guitar Craft influenced groups, and did some experimenting with electronics and loop delays.
I released a CD with electronic guitar loop improvisations called 'Escape Veloopity' in the late nineties on a small German label.
Since then, I played guitar in several free improvisation bands and got more involved with computer music.
In 2000, I did a musical online diary that featured a 10 second sound or song for each day.
The MY2K project is still online - click the link on my homepage.
In 2002, I released an ambient album called 'Stretched Landscape #1' on the British burn-on-demand label burningshed.com.
"A continuous suite of processed piano and textures, German composer Michael Peters (primarily, a guitarist) has produced a beguiling work worthy of comparison with the best of Brian Eno's Ambient output. Evocative, emotional and chilled."
Stretched Landscape contained treated field recordings and acoustic piano music, turned into something completely alien by a technique called Granular Synthesis. At the moment, I'm looking forward to the even more promising new sound worlds waiting in my new Kyma/Capybara system ...
Story behind the song
this track was done for a sampler of electroacoustic music, all based on field recordings done by the artists in their hometowns. For the complete CD, check out
http://www.music.columbia.edu/~cecenter/mhl21/ct/ct.html
From a review of this piece:
Biesfeld is a village in a rural area (Bergisches Land) just east of Cologne, Germany. Hills, small towns, small forests, meadows, small rivers, agriculture, horses, cows. On the track: songbirds, a vibrating fence wire, steps in the snow, cracking ice on puddles, airplane, water in a creek, hen, horse, wind in large plastic sheets, owl, chainsaws at a construction site, kids playing, crickets, car, thunder.
Tools used: DAT recorder, Cubase, Granulab, Audiomulch, Wavewarp.
I dare say that Michael Peters forgot to mention a radical fact about the town of Kürten, namely that the hero of contemporary music; the man that invented electronic music and its offsprings fifty years ago – Professor Karlheinz Stockhausen – lives right outside town in Kettenberg, and that he has made the little town world famous by the yearly Stockhausen Courses in the Kürten school complex.
A bulging, fairytale sound of enchanted birds opens the piece, with the addition of panning engine sounds and footsteps threading. There is sonic magic apparent right from the beginning, making this work a rather electroacoustic art piece.
Crackling, brittle sounds – as of thin ice breaking or flakes of ice falling through the air – render the soundscape a delicacy, a certain fingertip sensuality. The bird sounds are treated in a way which opens up views inside my mind of South Atlantic cliffs and giant Albatrosses hanging in the air, floating on the breeze – but this is hardly conceivable in Gemeine Kürten; only inside my head… and then I realize that what seemed like Albatross sounds indeed were manipulated barnyard fowl! This is a brilliant hen-permutation! A horse cuts in and changes the fabric of sounds into eerie whining elastics, with inherent, short brute sounds, as if from cut-up sawmill audio, with children’s happy voices as a moderating factor. We’re thrown right into a dense forest, where the birds have the upper hand, completely dominating the environment. It is very beautiful and fantasy-enticing, slipping seamlessly into the realm of the fairytale, the magic forest of old, of myths and archetypes. Cricket sounds move us back into the city and its parks, also opening a possibility of cars sweeping past in the distance, and the deeply summery combination of cicadas and thunder closes this magnetic piece, which impressed me very much with its artistic content and its technical skill, right in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s backyard. I’m sure he’d in fact enjoy hearing this Kürten account!
