Von den Künstlern heißt es: “This is an exploration of horizontal music; a music of restless and morphing vistas. It is formed through collisions, layers, and repetitions that build a force simultaneously minimal, and brute. Nine simple gestures played on one single instrument create blurred fields, full of distortion. Each composition balances these spaces differently: in one we wander through a large sacral reverberation chamber, in the next we find ourselves in a dimly lit and uncanny cavern. All of the tracks follow an elemental set of tones, played in repetition, each of which result in unexpected variation and refraction. We’ve chained together various conditions such as high contrast, density, and looseness into a seemingly endless resonance. We reach for an edge, but it slips away each time. The freedom of this album lies in the peacefulness of friction: static drones rubbing against fundamental bass pulses, bittersweet harmonies confronting harsh overdrive. Heavy breathing, celestial echoing”.

Trotz spielerischer und experimenteller Ansätze bleibt der Fokus klar: Präzision, Wiederholung, und das Arbeiten in mikroskopischen Maßstäben. Zimoun beschreibt das Instrument als “oszillierend, atmend, vibrierend” – beinahe wie ein früher Synthesizer. Bekannt ist Zimoun, wie in einem Essay von Ulf Kallscheidt auf der Webseite des Künstlers nachzulesen ist, vor allem für seine installativen Klangarbeiten, in denen einfache Alltagsmaterialien wie Pappe, Draht oder kleine Elektromotoren mittels Rotation und Schwingung in Bewegung versetzt werden. Seine oft raumgreifenden Konstruktionen setzen das Verhältnis von Ordnung und Chaos, Masse und Individualität ins Zentrum – und bleiben trotz mechanischer Prozesse dem Prinzip der Reduktion verpflichtet. Auch in “Harmonium I–VI” zeigt sich diese Haltung: Ein scheinbar einfaches Ausgangsmaterial wird mit äußerster Konzentration auf seine klanglichen Möglichkeiten hin ausgelotet. Die Produktion und Aufnahme entstand 2024/2025, das Mastering übernahm Lawrence English.

“This album is entirely based on sounds generated by the guitar. I’ve been interested in the guitar as a sound source for some time and have explored it on previous editions including Guitar Studies I-III. On this work, I’ve experimented with different methods and materials, specifically a Magnatone tube amplifier from the 1960s, and various speaker membranes covered with dust, soil, or small stones. The friction of these materials on the vibrating speaker membranes produced slight distortions and irregularities in the sounds, alongside the warm tube tones of the vintage amp. With these recordings as a starting point, I replayed these sounds into various containers and spaces, re-recording them to capture and integrate natural reverb. In the final iterative step, I used a multiband equalizer to make gentle and slow live manipulations in the microstructures of the sounds throughout the composition, and recorded these as well. This approach aimed to create soundscapes that, despite having a rather static character, exhibit much liveliness and gentle transformations in their textures. It is the sense of vast space, the sparse landscape and its apparent emptiness, or the psychedelic atmospheres that start to manifest in the heat, twilight, or blur, that I associate with the composition.

12k betonen den räumlichen Aspekt auch in diesen nicht speziell installationsorientierten Arbeiten und referieren auch auf den organisch-schöpferischen Aspekt der Kompositionen: “His compositions evoke a sense of place rather than following narrative developments somehow akin to architectural spaces. Although the individual compositions often undergo minimal changes over time, they exhibit continuous developments and variations in their microstructures. They feel more like an organism constantly transforming and living, rather than evolving into something different. This reflects Zimoun’s fundamental interest in creating systems that foster complexity and a multitude of variations within simple structures and elements, continuously nourished and nurtured by the guitar sounds”.

“With the Guitar Studies series I’ve dealt solely with noises and sounds produced by guitars. Partly I played the guitars by hand in a more conventional way, but more often I prepared them, or activated them by using small DC motors. I used various microphones for the recordings, as well as the loose contact of a pickup and many different amps; from a small toy amp that was partially defective to a beautiful Magnatone amp with analogue tremolo from the sixties and an old Fender Amp I bought together with my first guitar when I was 10 years old. I also played recorded sounds back in different environments, for example inside a cardboard tube or in different rooms with various sizes, and then recorded them again. This way I added natural resonate and spatiality to the sounds. I also created a distorted sounds by sending the signal of the guitar to a naked speaker membrane lying on the table, and then put some sand on the membrane itself. The friction between the membrane and the sand then created various forms of distortion. I was trying to test various processes of iteration to discover how transformed the guitar might become.

I did not work with loops in any of the compositions. For each layer in each piece, I recorded whatever I was exploring over the whole period of about an hour. In this way, I put together countless hours of sounds. Through the almost endless overlaying and long recording takes, I have tried to achieve a kind of liveliness, even if at the same time no major changes happen in the composition. It’s never exactly the same, but never going somewhere else either. In that sense these compositions also have a strong sculptural component. After this process, I started working on the microstructures of the recordings. For example, I recorded slow equalizer shifts in some of these tracks over the whole period of time. I also played these live via various controllers and analogue equalizers. This approach allowed the individual frequencies to become more present over long periods of time or mix with others. Figuratively speaking, this is similar to using a lamp (or various lamps) to illuminate a sculpture from different perspectives, or to create slow changes in light, which affects our perception of the sculpture. At different sonic stages, this can also provoke additional psychoacoustic phenomena. Through these methods I have tried to create a complexity in the microstructures of the sounds and their evolutions. ” (Zimoun)

@ Room40