liquid space 02: numbers-rmx

authors: Chris Burke aka Glomag [ usa ] LAb[au]

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"My first experience with the Kraftwerk song "Numbers" was seeing a basketball game on a neighborhood court in New York City in 1980. The music blasted from a boom box as the players enacted their complex ballet around the court. The understanding of the relationship of beat to time to space did not need to be expressed. It was innately understood by the players and seemed to facilitate their movements as I passed. Besides the fact that the verbal counting in the piece was done in a number of languages, several of which are certainly spoken on a New York City basketball court, the game was ruled by the beat which specified where the player should be at a given moment. "

LAb[au] have designed a digital space for Numbers that expresses this relationship on its most basic level. A grid of sound objects is made navigable with hidden layers that are accessed in real time performance. Time is experienced through the relationship of the grid to the music and voices. At one set of coordinates "Ein, zwei, drei..." is prominent. A few virtual steps away, the counting continues but in Japanese, the German decreasing in loudness with each step. The beat delineates time from one point to the next. Lab[au] have also implemented a time-warp effect, that jumps the user to a far outpost with a unique sound mix, looking back on and hearing the grid from a distance. With every movement, music maps out time as it relates to space. Kraftwerk's original was enormously influential and has been referenced in music many times over.

In addition to my translation and fragmentation of the original, I worked in as many of these as I could find. Afrika Bambaata and Arthur Baker's "Planet Rock" lifted the melody from an earlier Kraftwerk song and the live version includes the japanese counting from Numbers as a call and response with

the crowd. It was a short hop from that to Run DMC's "It's Like That" the beat of which owes a bit to Kraftwerk via Bambaata. More distant are the counting chorus fragments from "Einstein on the Beach" by Phillip Glass and the the short wave radio voices from "The Numbers Stations".

Throughout the world there are stations broadcasting human voices reading a set of numbers. Are they used by governments? Banks? They are numbers moving across the world, delineating time and space."