Playing today ... The Five An A Half Minute Hallway

When I discovered Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves" in a bookstore during my early zeros US "interlude" I was completely fascinated by his idea of a house that was bigger on the inside than on the outside – and the way the book was structured and designed. My copy eventually fell apart, drenched by water and warped by reading it on the train. Back then, it inspired me to design a set of recordings that eventually became "Schismotecture" or "The Navidson Record". The featured track is from those recordings and the title, "The Five An A Half Minute Hallway", is another reference to Danielewski's book. This one and the other tracks of the album proper (the Bandcamp version features a further architectural audio experiment from a different project, "Game Piece for Architecture") feature an ambient and noisy blend of industrial with a mysterious character evoking the emotions triggered by reading the book. This and the other tracks are supposed to acoustically complement the exploration of the mysterious house – they are an imaginary soundtrack of the mind.

What did the original liner notes say? "Schismotecture a.k.a. “The Navidson Record” is a conceptual cycle of recordings inspired by the concept of the house that is larger on the inside than on the outside from Mark Z. Danielewski's novel “House of Leaves.” Similar to the design of Friedrich Kiesler's “Endless House” it declares a state of perceptive emergency by dissolving the conventions of architectural geometry into a continuum, thus eerily creating an intellectual counterpart to the cave by having emerged from the depth of the earth. Schismotecture takes these spatial concepts into the realm of the audible. The recordings combine electroacoustic composition and improvised sessions (synthesizers, effects) with field recordings and electric guitar and bass guitar" (2002).