Particle Tracking

Siegmar Fricke's earliest musical experiments since 1981 involved reel-to-reel recordings of short-waves and acoustic noises that were arranged in the stereo-field to complete compositions of musique-concrète. He has been listening until today to a lot of records from the 60s and 70s by avantgarde-composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Henry or Luc Ferrari; later on he bought many records with music of the worldwide experimental industrial scene: Whitehouse, Esplendor Geometrico, Maurizio Bianchi... Fricke has particularly been fascinated by their uncompromising approach in sound / structure and their explorations in freeform-electronica beyond all existing borders of conventional songs. After the complex activities within the worldwide tape-scene from 1985-1993 he concentrated on his solo-works and also on collaborations with important figures of the experimental scene: Maurizio Bianchi from Milano, Miguel A. Ruiz (Orfeon Gagarin) from Madrid, Giancarlo Toniutti from Udine. All the personal experiences from experimentations on sound and collaboration-projects resulted later in his central solo-project PHARMAKUSTIK whose sound-approach can be defined as follows: “Audioclinical investigation; sound-research; generation of completely organic and highly abstract tissues; inter-modulating soundpools related to medical subjects; neurochemical ambience; formant modulation of selected voice-particles, bit-crushed rhythm-fractures; complex combinations of plugins/modulators/effect-periphery”. PHARMAKUSTIK is related to medical subjects because the working-methods on sound have similarities to surgical procedures: cutting acoustic particles and using granular-synthesis and complex parameters for complete dissection and re-implantation of electronic fragments. Besides many CDs and net-releases there are two vinyl records by PHARMAKUSTIK so far: "Neurochemie" (2010 on www.rotorelief.com) and the limited private transparent vinyl-edition of the "Cryosection"-EP (2013).

The newest album "Particle Tracking", released in March 2014 by Nostress Netlabel in limited edition deluxe-format, can be considered as the most radical PHARMAKUSTIK-product so far in which more pulsating, velocimetric and granular tissues have been involved; in addition various new custom-built sound-generators have been used to create sharp radiological signals, overlapping in complex and dense fields of necrobiotic areas. The album's subject concentrates on the tracking of sound-events within the stereophonic flow-field, the listener acting as multiple-camera-system during the act of aural analysis.