Concept and Realisation: Burkhard Beins
Technical Development: Sukandar Kartadinata


See: First Presentation at Ausland (Berlin) Nov. 2007 - Photo Gallery

See: Second Presentation at Q-O2 (Brussels) May 2008 - Photo Gallery


By means of everyday materials acoustically produced sounds become decoupled from their origins and spread out onto several resonating materials in the room, analogously to a multi-channel diffusion of electro-acoustic music through a mutiple speaker system.
Several medium-sized polystyrene boxes become installed on columns, edges or walls and ceiling of the room; ideally also in some adjoining rooms if they are openly connected to the installation room. Long pieces of string attached to these elements become taut, gathered and fixed in one point of the room.

In the "concert-installation" POR a performer stands in front of this point inbetween the taut strings and produces a variety of hiss and other sounds by rubbing, scratching and scraping the strings with alternating pressure, tempo and rhythm. In certain moments these strings become also played by modified battery driven propellers producing layers of sustained drones. All these sounds become audible only through the resonating polystyrene elements without using any additional amplification. So far POR has been installed and performed by Burkhard Beins in Berlin (UA 2000, 2003, 2006, 2012, 2013), London, Milano (both 2005), Palermo (2006), Brussels (2008), Densités Festival/France (2009) and at Muong Studio, Hoa Binh/Vietnam (2015).

For SEKANTE, an entirely installational version of this set-up, the performer becomes replaced by 7 chip-controlled propellers, each continously performing it's individual course of frequency independently. Always unpredictable numbers and combinations of resonating elements - densely layered multiplicities of sounds and overtones alternating with silence or very sparse action - have been achieved by the use of prime numbers for generating the different frequencies. The audience can move around in the room freely to get quite different acoustic perspectives on the combinations of sounds and occuring overtones.

Kindly funded by the "Initiative für Neue Musik e.V. Berlin" (INM) the frequencies became programmed and applied by Sukandar Katardinata throughout 2007. The installation SEKANTE has seen it's first presentation on the 22nd of November 2007 at ausland in Berlin, inaugurated by a live-performance of POR and then shown for another 3 days. In the beginning of May 2008 a second presentation took place at QO-2 Werkhuis in Brussels. Another presentation took place in 2013 together with POR and the new sound installation Modulation I at Quiet Cue Intermedia, Berlin.