News |Staahaadler Aff – Composition for percussion and sample pad by Oxana Omelchuk

"Staahaadler Aff" is the name of the inn Steinheidel in Erzgebirge dialect. The name goes back to the 19th century mandolin orchestrion in the dining room, whose central figure is a monkey with a mandolin. Percussionist Dirk Rothbrust uses his "orchestrion" in the composition of Villa Fellow Oxana Omelchuk, whose registers are not just timbres, but styles, genres, and semantic sound systems.

Often, music does not appear new, says Oxana Omelchuk. Above all, it seems like a transformation of older, rediscovered music and is no longer a medium of individual articulation. With her composition "Staahaadler Aff" Omelchuk draws the conclusion: "It is no longer about the invention, but about the game with Rediscovery, about telling something with what was rediscovered in other than the known contexts. The real and simulated sounds of a jukebox, the voice of a romance singer, the excerpts from a well-known salon music piece, the ticking of an old clock, the voice of Harry Partch make up the vocabulary of my piece. Such antiques, such "spent" materials, frozen thanks to sampling technology, become the subject of a series of variations in which the fixed material (samples) is assembled during the live-performance to new forms."

We think that the result sounds pretty new. The recording took place in mid-November during a get-together of this and next year’s Villa Fellows in Berlin.

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