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Meander Tapes – Tender Sounds for Brutalist Architecture

St. Gertrude Session

2015/17 Sound Art

St.Gertrud, Cologne

HMKV, Dortmund

In the church of St. Gertrud, built by Gottfried Böhm and awarded the Cologne Architecture Prize in 1967, we took 2 days to explore the interior acoustically.

During this time, over 8 hours of multi-channel audio recordings were made.For the recordings of the acoustic-performative events, we distributed 8 microphones at different locations in the room. We kept changing the locations of the microphones to explore the different factors and shapes of the architecture. This led to an intense engagement with the space and the sound within it. We were able to design choreographies around the microphones and also incorporate the acoustic elements coming from outside (the beat of the nearby S-Bahn line, for example) into our actions.