WalkürenWalk (excerpt)

For WalkürenWalk, an electronic sound performance for computer and controllers, Essl has chosen a fragment of 30 seconds from Wagner’s “Ride of the Walkyries”, segmented into tiny sound grains which are overlapped and re-combined during the course of a live-performance. These “nano”-particles reveal certain substructures of the music like a view through a microscope. In his adaptation, the music dismisses has lost the monumentality and powerful image of Wagner’s Walkyries, the messengers of death, who retrieved the dead heroes from the battlefields and brought them to Walhall, where they were revitalized for the ultimate battle - the Twilight of the Gods. In the crackling impulse sequences, certain aspects of Wagner’s sound spectrum become evident, although in an alienated manner. But the rhythms skeletonize the energetic momentum and the magnificence of the heroines of death as if the music would rather depict Gustav Mahler’s ghost army in Revelge. It draws the listener’s attention away from the triumphant war goddesses towards the miserable victims, who’s lives they take. For every performance the musical material is recomposed in realtime, thus creating new syntheses – like in every war others die, soldiers and heroes, without any pomp. (Susanne Vill)