julean simon - wax videos

for Ursula Blickle Archiv Kunsthalle Wien

Julean Simon has a background as a saxophonist in the early eightis and as a videoartist in the late eightis. Between 1989 and 2001 he worked in research and software-development for several companies in US and BRD. In 2001 he discovered the wind-midi-controller - an electronic wind instrument -and started to program voices for this instrument, to modify the hardware and to practice intensively to develop special playing techniques.

Most videos in this sampler are music-videos, documenting various projects. One reason to use video is to demonstrate, that all music was played live and to adress the irritation of the audience that e.g. piano-like or percussive sounds or an entire ensemble was indeed generated by a single wind instrument (today's electronic music is mainly produced in non-live studio-situations, more or less by technicians). The videos dont have a distinguished character since usually a camera (without a cameraman) was positioned and recorded the session. The lean postproduction attempts only to find some form to transport the idea, with a minimum of effects.

berlinsky (dv/pal, 1min, simon.020825, Berlin)

Blues based on a "guitar"-track that has been played on a breathcontroler, while staring at the alex from my backwindow

elvers-trilogy (dv/pal, 6min, simon.020526, Berlin)

1. artefacts (pal, 1min)
Minidrama with Jenny Elvers, 26. 05. 02 Traenenpalast/Berlin. Distortions of her face due to artefacts of the sorenson3-codecs.

2. ellipsis (pal, 2min)
Space established by seven figures: aquaqueen-skin, pupp, doggy, mirror, observer, matschmann, elli. The seven scenes linked by ellipses. Soundpiece (ellipsis) played with breathcontroller. visual: from elvers-material playing with sorenson3 codec artefacts.

3. jenny elvers head set (pal, 3min)
Extended minidrama with Jenny Elvers, Regina Lemnitz, e.a. reading "clash" (severin/schmidt) at Traenenpalst/Berlin. Having no tripod and shooting from the last row i decided to manually compensate the movement in every frame, so that she seems to be connected to her head set like a puppet...

cadett ballett (dv/pal, 6min, simon.020301, St.Petersburg)
Music-video for sto:let (Alexandr Kopanev -voc / J. Simon -synth)

matti (dv/pal, 2min37, simon.030515, Berlin)
plastikmucke live at fiib, 15.5.03 berlin. Peter Moldauer being the first drummer in plastikmucke. matti is the 12th piece on the plastikmucke CD-ROM "aeloi"

3 pieces (6min22) from:
(dreizehn) Schauer (dv/pal, 27min, 13 chapters, simon.051217, Berlin)

Ingo Reulecke (dance), Julean Simon (music/video)
After projects with more dancers we did this duo-piece. Actually we planned for this performance an even smaller room (open cube), to intensify the confrontaion with the walls. "schauer" (shower) refers to the location we finally chose for this project, but it may refer also to the feeling this term denotes: clusters of sounds rieseln onto the shoulders of the dancer. At that time i have been in a phase of trying to adapt the piano-sound and -gestus to a wind-instrument (see also 33 short piano pieces and grand() for ARCO Madrid). This is mainly a challenge of specializing a tounging-technique, there is not much modulation you can do once the tone is generated. So I combined several voices to get something like a "prepared piano" voice-setup.The piece is also about tempo, which also correlated to a plan of Ingo to do a piece on Nancarrows music.

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prmt (1min50) from:
pyramidale 2005 (dv/pal, 10min30, simon.05, Berlin)

Solo-Concert at the Pyramidale Festival in Berlin Hellersdorf for Contemporary Music.

00:03:52:21 (4min) from:
the sintra session (dv/pal, 25min, 7chapters, simon.060218 Sintra/Portugal)

Ludger Lamers - mooves, Julean Simon - grooves
This was a spontaneous session with no practice, whatsoever. He attended a concert I had at the Goethe-Institute in Lissabon and talking afterwards, we decided to perform in this nice garden in Sintra

d"tact rag (4min26) from:
mixnitzish8 (dv/pal, 40min, 8 chapters, simon.070417, Mixnitz/A)

j.simon (wax), ewald oberleitner (acoust.bass)
This 8th session of the mixnitzish-project (which finally resulted in 9 CDs) made it to a video-session.