Walter Ruttmann/DJ Spooky u.a. (Walter Ruttmann/DJ Spooky et al.)
«Weekend Remix»

»Weekend by Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941) is a pioneering work from the early days of radio. In an 11 minute 10 second collage of words, music fragments and sounds, the film-maker and media artist Walter Ruttmann presented on 13 June 1930 an avant-garde and radically innovative radio piece: an acoustic picture of a Berlin weekend urban landscape. 68 year later the Bayrischer Rundfunk (Radio Bavaria) invites six musicians / artists to produce six remix-versions of »Weekend«.

The remixes of Klaus Buhlert and Ernst Horn took Ruttmann’s compositional principles of Weekend and circumscribed them with their own compositions. With the new digital technology new methods of composition were also applied. Pathos and rhythm were given a contemporary drive, the ironic moments of the disrespectfully edited original were amplified further with a subsequent treatment by the composers Horn and Buhlert, new audio spaces were opened up.
In 1998 Berlin, to rococo rot sought acoustic equivalents to the elements Ruttmann had recorded in 1930. Their version is – in film terms – a remake, in musical terms a cover version, and at the same time a homage to Ruttmann and the City of Berlin.
In their Weekend remixes, the British musician Mick Harris and DJ Spooky from New York staged a return to the fatalistic mood of the original. The remix compositions focussed on machine noises and the acoustic signals of disturbed communication. Apart from the added bass and rhythm tracks, Harris and DJ Spooky used only the original as material, processed with digital machines. The basis for the remix by the Canadian John Oswald was the loud noise on the copy of the 1930 original. Oswald’s remix conducted a digital material battle with the original, one which duplicated in Ruttmanns discontinous rhythm the copying noises which had developed over the time. «
Barbara Schäfer

Includes:
Walter Ruttmann: Weekend (Original Recording 1930)
Ernst Horn: Sympathie für Schulze Remix
DJ Spooky: Gedanken Form Remix
Mick Harris: Makeshift Whitebox Remix
Klaus Buhlert: production memory remix
to rococo rot: Berlin 98 Version
John Oswald: wknd 58 remix
Producer: BR Hörspiel und Medienkunst

Artists statements:

Walter Ruttmann: Weekend
Produced by: Berliner Rundfunk 1930
»Everything audible in the whole world becomes material. This infinite material can now be given new meaning by fashioning it in accordance with the laws of time and space. Not only rhythm and dynamics will be exploited by thos new audio art’s will to reshape, but also the space created by the whole scale of the sound differences arising. This opens the way for a completely new acoustic art – new in ist means and in ist effect.« (Walter Ruttmann)

Ernst Horn: Sympathie für Schulze Remix
»The more often I listened to it, the more I perceived a naive, happy, optimistic charm, a playful futurism I could not resist. I did not make any sudden cuts, like those employed by Ruttmann, but in my samples I merged little scenes with gentle fadeouts.«

DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid: Gedanken Form Remix
»Essentially my remix is the encounter between two cultures, both of which in a state of transition – just like in Germany between the two World Wars, there is in America a great sense of uncertainty as the century ends. All seen, of course, through the eyes of a young Afro-American man.«

Mick Harris: Makeshift Whitebox Remix
»Weekend – a fantastic sound source. But the piece is so self-contained that I had no desire to rearrange it. And so I looked for sounds which allowed me to compose a new piece in as similar a mood as possible.«

Klaus Buhlert: production memory remix
»For me this story is very valuable. I want to tell it in Ruttmann’s strains, even with Ruttmann’s sounds, I want to open up a few spaces ad reprocess them with my work of the past few years as a hommage to Ruttmann, and for this purpose I have interweaved music and radio play sequences from my work of the past few years. Out of a monophone Ruttmann take of the 30s there suddenly emerges a space of the 90s.«

to rococo rot:>Link Text Lippok> Berlin 98 Version
»According to the cutting schedule, Weekend was edited very musically, with different times, for the Friday evening for example, where the whole Friday work and machine world is edited according to 1/4s, 1/16s and we roughly kept to this, and for today it was more a matter of finding out and hearing how a weekend works in terms of notes, these were our guidelines.«

John Oswald: wknd 58
»There is constant noise on the recording, and that’s what I had to work with. Instead of trying to eliminate it as completely as possible by technical means, I decided to do the opposite.«