ORF Musikprotokoll at Autumn of Styria

“Steirischer Herbst” (Styrian Autumn) may at first sound like a season of colours that can be admired all across the beautiful Styrian mark. THE “Steirische Herbst” however, is a rather local event. Precisley speaking, this particular time of the year can be witnessed only in the Styrian city of Graz in the shape of a very special festival. When a platform such as this meets with other long standing institutions like the musikprotokoll, the late summer is indeed a season of artistic fruitfullness.

For forty years the “Steirische Herbst” has been among the few festivals in the world that is in its essence genuinely multi-disciplinary. Long before the cry for interconnection of the arts was on everyone’s lips, it combined art, music, performance, dance, drama, literature, architecture, new media and theory.

Along with the Austrian Broadcasting Service (Österreichischer Rundfunk), Radio Österreich 1 and Radio Steiermark, the musikprotokoll serves as a kind of laboratory, in which the pioneering exploration after new developments and trends is carried out in common effort with the audience. Ranging from orchestral music with the ORF Radio Symphonic Orchester of Vienna, musical ensembles and chamber music to performance and sound installations, the nuanced variety of genre defies classification and in many cases includes contributions that have been designed and produced specifically for the festival. Founded in 1968 by Emil Breisach the musikprotokoll has been hosted annually ever since.

Not only did 2015 mark the conjunction of established institutions, but also of very special locales in and around Graz that allowed the heading ‘multi-disciplinary’ to flourish in a new autumn splendour.

The Lesliehof on the Murinsel is home to the project “NIXE: the port/the ship”. “In the port” 14 correspondent cubicles, such as those employed in broadcasting items of interest throughout the world, were chosen as instruments and venues of presentation. For ten days, each of these cubicles would be ‘played’ by artists, thus serving as target location of the artistic intervention as well as the point of its reception. This means that only one individual ‘soundtrack’ or acoustic intervention could be experienced on the spot of the mounted correspondent cubicle. However, all of the soundtracks also found their way onto the Murinsel which, being the only locale in Graz that is completely surrounded by water, was reinterpreted as ‘the Ship’. This ship, the ‘Nixe’ (siren) while enduring wind and weather, sun and rain, was being inundated by the NIXE artists’ siren songs. Fragments of these 14 sound creations, chosen at random would drift by the Murinsel ship, each Sound Art Piece following, a soundscape in itself, the fluctuating current.

In order to realize such an extraordinary performance at its highest level, the Austrian Broadcasting Service engaged Lambda Labs to literally lend a hand on deck ‘the ship’ or rather in the correspondent cubicles. For 10 days 8 TX-2A and 2 MF-15A were weathering wind and waves on the Murinsel. 26 CX-1A and 2 MF-15A in a stereo installation provided a brilliant acoustic experience inside the cubicles.

Ship and Port of the musikprotokoll project ‘NIXE’ were inaugurated by federal president Dr. Heinz Fischer on October 8th 2015 at 5 p.m. After a short concert by Mazen Kerbaj and Franz Hautzinger including a selection of readings from Ludwig Salvators Lieder der Bäume (Songs of the Trees), a genuine ship’s christening of the temporary ‘Nixe’ was performed at the hands of president Dr. Heinz Fischer. Afterwards the 14 correspondent cubicles in the court of the Joanneum had been opening their hatches.

Lambda Labs was kindly supported by the rental companies WM-Sounds and Schirnhofer Multimedia.