"BERLIN-WARSZAWA-EXPRESS" is the title of a soundcomposition by the duo Merzouga that was commissioned by Radio_Copernicus in summer 2005. For a long time computermusician Eva Pöpplein and electric bassist Janko Hanushevsky have been interested in "urban sound”, the highly energetic cloud of noise that surrounds the modern city person – the urbanite -, being a direct result of his everyday actions. On numberless journeys the two studied the sound of different cities and collected a huge amount of field-recordings.

This resulted in a growing enthusiasm for the musical structures, the density of different acoustic textures and the dynamic range that are hidden in a city´s noise. Once you look at it that way, what we try hard to ignore 24 hours a day suddenly starts to sound like - music!

In "BERLIN-WARSZAWA-EXPRESS" the duo experiments with that change of focus. The composition is based on three field-recordings of Berlin and three field-recordings of Warsaw that the musicians used as blueprints, as basic musical information. The randomly documented sound situation thus determines the dramaturgical development of each piece. All of the material was "distilled” from the field -recordings on the laptop and arranged in multi tracks along the unchanged time-line of the original track. The only exceptions are the first and the last piece where a track of prepared electric bass had been added.

Noise becomes music. Music becomes a part of noise. The woman walking with her red heels over the platform chooses the tempo in which the "BERLIN-WARSZAWA-EXPRESS" starts rolling.

Commissioned by Thomas Doktor for Radio_Copernicus 2005

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