The Leslies
Horst Rickels/Robert Pravda

'Soundtrack for an imaginairy movie no 3

The audience takes place in a 'field ' of 8 loudspeaker-objects listening to a soundscape with imaginary qualities.
The speakers of the installation are not standard but 'Leslies', that means they are vertically and horizontally rotating.

The 8 speakers send out a different sound each, resulting in a multi-track soundscape with more channels and directions than 5.1 , the regular movie - soundstandard comes with.
With 'Leslies' the space becomes an important part of the whole installation :
By the rotation of the Leslies the walls reflect the sound in diverse directions and causes fenomena like shifting of the pitch (doppler) , reverb and combination- tones.

The source of the sound-samples are various:
-samples from organ-pipes played with different air-pressure
-field-recordings
-special instruments and sound-sources

Partly the samples will be performed 'naturally', partly they 'll be transformed and edited live during the performance.

From its origin the Leslie-speaker has been develloped for a completition of the Hammond-organ:
to fake the space of a church by imitating the diffusity of her acoustics.

All of the 8 speaker objects now have started a new live in this installation after having been hidden in boxes and Hammond-organs since decades.
Seems that they like it.

Horst Rickels
- composer, performer and instrument builder, works in installation and sound.
He was born in Germany(1947) and has been living in Holland sins 1972. He has studied piano building at ‘Grotrian-Steinweg’,Braunschweig and ‘Bechstein’,Berlin. Trained as a pianist and saxophonist he took part of different improvising and instant composing ensembles,such as ‘The Four Winds’,’Der Junge Hund ‘and ‘The Maciunas Ensemble’. He studied electronic music composition with Dick Raaymakers at the Royal Conservatory,The Hague and theory of music with Jan van Dijck at the Brabant Conservatory,Tilburg. Since the late 70’s he has been making installations which feature air-powered objects.His compositions incorporate both the visual and acoustic elements of a space. e has presented his installations and performances in concert halls, galleries, castles and other odd industrial spaces across Europe from Kraków to Berlin and Amsterdam and in the United States from Houston to Miami and New York City.
Rickels is a lecturer at the ‘Design Academy Eindhoven’,The Royal Conservatory -‘interfaculty ArtScience’-,The Hague and guestprofessor at The RITS,radio-department, Brussels.

Robert Pravda is a sound artist based in the Netherlands. He studied engineering at the Technical Univsersity of Novi Sad (former Yougoslavia), after which he dedicated himself to making music in experimental underground circles as member of VIVIsect, Gensustors and Curare Kajones. His interest in the interdisciplinary arts brought him to the Interfaculty Image and Sound, where he earned his degree in 2002. He builds instruments for multimedia performances and makes algoritmic compositions for spatial sound and light installations. Founder and co-founder of projects and collectives as XorC, Out of Data, RecPlay, Hoi Lul!, MMC, Heckler & Koch. He teaches at the Art Science and New Arts Performer, both departments of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Music and Dance in the Hague. Besides his own work, he has made music installations for theatre and dance performances by Andrea Bozic, Edit Kaldor, Hester van Hasselt, a. o. In 2009, together with choreographer Andrea Bozic and visual artist Julia Willms, he co-founded interdisciplinary platform Tilt.