Next up in my series looking at free internet music is a triptych by Danish composer Martin Stig Andersen. To many, Andersen is likely best known for his award-winning music and sound design work on Limbo, one of the most breathtakingly stunning – and, often, terrifying – video games of recent times. A few years before this, from 2006 to 2008, Andersen created the three parts of the wonderfully-named Rabbit at the Airport, a 35-minute work combining electronic sound with bass clarinet, played by Gareth Davis. In my lengthy Dialogue with Davis, we discuss his collaborations with Andersen, and in the course of that discussion (which starts around 1 hour 25 minutes in) i was amazed to learn that all of the electronic sound through the three movements of the piece is directly derived from Davis’ clarinet:
SC: The sound world, especially in the three Rabbit at the Airport pieces, is astonishing, just astonishing. Although the relationship between the [electronic] material and what you’re doing is interesting because there are times, especially the first one, i think, where you are practically squashed by the electronics.
GD: Yes, although everything is me playing, it’s all live.
SC: Is it all you? Everything we hear?
GD: It’s all me, everything you hear is me. He constructed a kind of distortion using the pickup from an old record player, so he has the signal go through a pickup then through a kind of sonar device. So he constructed a mechanical distortion of sorts.
SC: i always thought it was almost like you pitted against the electronics, but in fact it’s all—
GD: It’s all just me. How it goes, as an album, you have this, first, really distorted, mechanical thing. And then when you get to Rabbit at the Airport II, then it’s pitting the real sounds of the clarinet against the distortion. […] And then III is more floaty, the scary rabbit’s gone.
