Product Review - Best Service Klanghaus
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A German artist’s unique instrument designs forge a new sound world.
For most of us, selecting an instrument we fancy owning is simply a matter of pointing at an item in a catalogue and saying ‘I want that one’. Top pros can go one better by asking manufacturers to build them custom instruments, ranging in scope and nuttiness from Pat Metheny’s 42‑string Pikasso guitar to Bjork’s ‘gameceleste’ (a hybrid, keyboard‑driven metallophone). At a higher level still are the visionaries who construct their own experimental musical designs from scratch: among their ranks we can count Benjamin Franklin (American Founding Father and inventor of the mechanised Glass Harmonica), Russian electronics wiz Lev Termen (Theremin) and our very own Henry Dagg, the ex‑BBC sound engineer who dreamed up the Sharpsichord and the ‘toy cat organ’ — look up these names on the net, it’s an entertaining way to spend half an hour or so!
Flying the flag for such far‑sighted musical creativity is German‑born artist‑musician Ferdinand Försch. While studying composition, percussion and electronic music in the ’70s, Försch played in rock, jazz, big‑band and orchestral settings, and put in a stint with hirsute pop band the Dukes (no, not the XTC psychedelic spin‑off), before founding the improvisational Percussion Road ensemble in 1977. From the beginning, our man was interested in exploring the sonic qualities of ‘objets trouvés’ such as brake drums, baking tins and timber. After undergoing a Road to Damascus‑style conversion during a brief UK seminar given by the out‑of‑the‑box musical thinker John Cage, Försch decided (in his own words), “to dedicate my life to the research of sound. I built my first instruments, metal drums, in 1982 — and I never stopped.”
Percussion maestro Ferdinand Försch performs live in Shanghai.
Having spent nearly three decades constructing ‘sound machines’, sound sculptures and installations, Försch’s collection of over a hundred instruments has graced concert stages and galleries around the world. In an echo of the aforementioned XTC’s Drums & Wires, they include drums, percussion and stringed instruments, many of them so visually stunning that they qualify as fully‑fledged works of art in their own right. A commentator remarked that these instruments look alien, but their other‑worldly, futuristic appearance is often tempered by a hint of something ancient — a few of the geometric shapes reminded me of Mayan symbols and Hindu mandalas, as well as evoking the Egyptian influence on Art Deco.
The maker shuns electronics in his live performances, preferring to let his instruments sound acoustically with no processing or sequencing. However, in his capacity as a composer of film and dance music, he does use computers and MIDI, like the rest of us, and it’s reasonable to assume that this led him to the idea of creating a sample library based on his instruments. Försch played all the samples himself and recorded them in his rehearsal studio, after which he spent six months working long hours to program the patches. The resulting 2.9GB collection is called Klanghaus (German for ‘Soundhouse’), taking its name from the maker’s experimental music venue in Hamburg.
The Klangrausch (‘sound frenzy’) section of the library houses some of its most iconoclastic metal sounds.
On a more mundane note, I should add that Klanghaus is formatted exclusively for Best Service’s Engine sample player (you can see my comments on Engine at www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug11/articles/world-percussion.htm), software for which is included with the library. The samples ship on a single DVD in a conventional product box (shame, I was hoping for an experimental polyhedron). Product activation is done at Yellow Tools’ site, Yellow Tools being the company that developed Engine for Best Service; newbie Engine users need to register and set up an online account, after which activation is straightforward provided you faithfully follow the instructions set out in Klanghaus’ ‘How to Activate’ document. Stray off the beaten path and you might end up lost in cyberspace.
Arctic Adventure
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Tue 22 May 2012
Sound On Sound : Est. 1985