Stamina (2001)

My second album marks the transition from an event based thinking towards the notion of sound as a stream. The five pieces are mainly concerned with “colour” and explore the vibrant threshold of just-recognizable harmonic elements, posing the interesting question of what you hear acoustically and what you hear by your brain’s effort of construction (listen to the very intimate and erotic opening piece below). The original liner notes:

“«Stamina» is the title of my second album. It means something like «life energy» or «soul power»; when I started this album I had a very depressive ambient vision on my mind, but finally it turns out to be rather «calm» and «remote» than depressive. As with «Azoiphon» I was trying to create an imaginary organic landscape, maybe stalking this time over the inside surface of my head and less over the outside; that is to say Stamina is more «reflective» than «transitive».

Apart from the semantic level there is also a great contrast concerning the type of processing I did on these new pieces. My sampler is covered with dust while the harddisk heads toward a collapse; large audio file layers supersede discrete samples. Some of the colourization has been done with my selfprogrammed software «FScape».”

Gruon Vibrant