The transportation company in Berlin and Brandenberg offered free transport on weekends in September, albeit a really bad idea in the midst of the pandemic (since trains are filled with people close to each other), I still decided to take advantage of it to visit a few places of interest in Brandenberg. I went to Rheinsberg, a town which houses a former palace, Schloss Rheinsberg. It once belonged to the royal families of the Prussian Empire.
The configuration of the palace and its garden provoked my interest. The palace was symmetrical, which its center axis aligns with its bridge, entrance, courtyard and a main statue in front of the palace. The center axis extends across the lake in front of the palace towards the other side, which is an obelisk commemorating the Seven Years’ War. Beside the palace is a large backyard garden of the palace called Lustgarten, which also has strong directionality towards the palace and different important buildings within the park, marked by the roads towards the palace, creating a visual link between the building and the palace. For instance, the Fortuna Temple has a visual connection towards the statue of the palace. Though many of the buildings in the park has been demolished (marked ehem. in the map), including Bacchus Temple, Fortuna Temple and the Chinese House, the base of the buildings were left behind. Each of these spaces have their own unique acoustic quality.
Ambisonics Recordings were done in 15 locations in the area, in different key locations of the main palace axis, former building locations, and key locations of the garden.
This piece was made to “scrub” through sound spaces which are in the same axis. For instance, the Palace Axis, Fortuna Temple and the Statue, Bacchus Temple and the Salon. This tries to connect the spaces sonically instead of visually, overlapping the sound spaces, exposing the contrast of difference in sound between these spaces in these axes.
The structure of the piece is basically starting off by marking the main palace axis first, then travelling towards the obelisk in geographical order, while scrubbing through the two axis of temples, moving towards a fast random shifting in spaces, ending in a re-emphasis of the palace axis, slowly ending at the obelisk.