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FB009: Wolfgang Müller Format: book+7", limited to 300 copies Released December 16th 2008. Featuring: >> Justus Köhncke Wolfgang Müller, composer, artist and founding member of Die Tödliche Doris, set out to recreate the calls of extinct bird species. To do so, he enlisted an impressive list of artist friends to help with the project. The participating artists were assigned one bird species each. The artists were provided with the available historical documentation of their specific species, and were asked to recreate the sounds with strict historical accuracy. In total, eleven bird calls were recreated, all in amazing detail. The sounds are collected here, on either 7” vinyl or on cd. The audio recordings are attached to the back cover of a 40 page book, containing Wolfgang Müller’s wonderful drawings and texts on all eleven species. The foreword is written by Úlfur Hróđólfsson. TRACKLIST: Sequence A:
Sequence B:
REVIEWS: Biba Kopf, The Wire #301: Wolfgang Müller - Extinction events Since retiring his underground Berlin dada group DieTödliche Doris, Wolfgang Müller has developed a thing for winged creatures. His solo LP BAT (1987) worked with the ultrasonic frequencies of bats. For his latest project, Séance Vocibus Avium, he called on his brother Max, Namosh, Justus Köhncke, Annette Humpe, Frieder Bützmnann and Stereo Total among others to reimqine the birdcalls of extinct species.The results are collected on a 7" or CD housed in a small book with Müller's own bird illustrations. "Since the 16th century, around 150 bird species have become extinct," writes Müller, using the Icelandic pseudonym Úlfur Hróđólfsson - In the book. 'It is very rare to find the calls of the birds described." Locating just 11 such descriptions, he allocated one apiece to his volunteers, who vocally and electronically realised them as faux field recordings. "The participating musicians were forced to leave their bodies," he continues, "instead entering the body of a bird. At that very moment music and musician disappear. We hear the bird, silenced long ago, call once again." Müller's own contribution is the great auk, last sighted in 1844, In 1990, after his first journey to Iceland, which has since become hls home from home, he made a model of the bird from clay, paper, cloth, paint, goose and hen feathers. Four years later, he recreated its call based on "a number of historical scientific descrlptions". Müller's other omithologlcal projects
include Blue Tit: The German-lcelundic Blue Tit Book (Martln-Schmitz-Verlag 1997), and
Hausmusik: Starlings From Hiertøya Sing
Kurl Schwitters catalogue and CD (Galerle
Katze 5 2000).The latter originated from an
outing he made to the Norwegian island
where German dadaist Schwitters spent his
summers from 1932. After viewing Schwitters's merzbau-like collages in the
now derelict holiday home, Müller was dozing
outside listening to the starlings, when it
struck him how theilr song resembled
Schwitter's Ursonate. Noting the starling's
capacity for mimickry, he postulated that the
local bilrds had copied Schwitters rehearsing
his voice compositions and passed it down to Séance Vocibus Avium is released on Fang Bomb. Vital Weekly, Frans de Waard: The name might not ring immediate bells, but Wolfgang Müller's claim to fame is that he is one of the founding members of Die Tödliche Doris and a lover of birds - although no claim there yet. He is also a visual artist and has drawn pictures of extinct bird species. There are printed here in this beautiful art book, which comes along with a 7" record of artistic reinterpretation of these birds. Artists received documentation about these birds and were asked to produce the sounds for them. This is definitely art with the capital A. Some of these pieces sound like birds, while others choose to create vocalizations of those sounds or apply electronic methods. I like this a lot, simply because it sounds so weird, and even has something musical to it. Play this at your party and it will surely raise more than one eyebrow. Music here is provided by Namosh, Max Müller, Frieder Butzmann, Frederik Schikowski, Justus Köhncke, Annette Humpe, Francoise Cactus & Bretzel Göring, Nicholas Bussmann, Hartmut Andryczuk, Khan and Wolfgang Müller himself. One of the stranger things recently. De:Bug #130, March 2009: Dieses Buch mit kurzen Illustrationen und einem Tonträger, (wahlweise CD oder 7”) widmet sich der Rekonstruktion von Stimmen ausgestorbener Vögel – ein Thema, das Wolfgang Müller (Die Tödliche Doris) schon seit über fünfzehn Jahren umtreibt. Zwölf befreundete Musiker hat er hier damit beauftragt, alles strikt auf der Basis vogelkundlerischer Beschreibungen. Ohne Frage ein bizarres Projekt. Hört man allerdings die Aufnahmen, entgalten sich hier allerlei zum Teil ungeahnte Spannungsfelder: zwischen dem kreativen Residuum, das die Beteiligten ja einzubringen nicht umhin können, und wissenschaftlicher Nüchternheit, zwischen Memento Mori und Komik der Mimesis, zwischen Phantasie auch der Hörers und verlorengegangener Welt. Schwer, hier einzelne Artists herauszuheben; am ausdrucksstärksten bleibt wohl die Ursprungsaufnahme von Kristbjörg Kjeld und Wolfgang Müller, Spaß machen aber auch die täuschend echten Frieder Butzmann und der im Dickicht verschwindende Khan, die Vogelkostüme von Naomsh, dem Stereo-Total-Duo und vom Frederik Schikowski, die handzahme Annette Humpe, der elektrische Justus Köhncke, in der Tat alle, aber genug der Namen. Fang [Bomb], sonst mit Leftfield-Elektronik aus ihrer Heimatstadt Göteborg befasst, haben den Release gebührend sorgfältig ediert. Ein kleines Schmuckstück. The Sound Projector (online), Ed Pinsent: If it’s a concept record you want, you can do no better than Séance Vocibus Avium, a collection put together for the Fang Bomb label by Wolfgang Müller which intends to ‘recreate the calls of extinct bird species’. The work takes the form of a book with beautiful line drawings of certain extinct birds (made by Müller himself), and a record of sounds created by selected European artists who were assigned the task of reincarnating one bird each. Sounds incredibly fanciful, but the record is beautiful – short and mysterious clips of sound, perhaps concocted through a mixture of field recordings, actual bird calls, and lots of imagination – each one prefaced with a short spoken introduction. As you read the short paragraphs about each vanished member of the avian kingdom, look at the simple drawings and hear the sounds, I guarantee that a teardrop will be glistening in your eye within seconds, as a terrible sense of loss descends on your shoulders. Müller was a founding member of Die Tödliche Doris, whose Fallersleben (VINYL ON DEMAND VOD 7) was an attempt to somehow recreate a lost live performance of theirs through using some sort of time-travel séance-based methods, and struck me as completely preposterous at the time. Yet with this record we do indeed seem to have a method of retrieving lost information from the past, arriving through a time machine a few seconds at a time. Uncanny! Two editions of this – book with a vinyl single (300 copies) or a CD (100 copies).
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