AUDITORIUM - 84

This is a digital release that can be found on most streaming services. To find the album, pllease use both the band name and the album title in your search - in this case: "Auditorium 84"

Jbrandtp's notes:
George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-four" has become increasingly relevant as time has passed, and it remains a central book from the twentieth century. It was written in 1948, and at that time 1984 was far in the future. However, now that we are in 2026, 1984 is a rather distant past. Back in 1984, I released a cassette tape together with Peter Sørensen, called Fragmenter Af En By (Fragments of a City). The tape marks the transition from the more instrumental and industrial Grotesque to the more song-oriented Cat's Cradle. On theis tape, we also find my first experiments with field recordings. We had a small, partially portable stereo system - a kind of precursor to the ghetto blaster. I had mounted a microphone on the system and went around the city making recordings, later used in the music.

The fact that 1984 in Orwell's book is a dystopian future that more and more resembles our present, and at the same time for us in 2026 is a dark and dusty past, led me to the idea of using the Fragmenter Af En By cassette tape as material for an Auditorium album that would have this time-paradox as its theme.




After having digitized the old, dusty cassette tape, I started extracting various usable elements from the material. From these elements I could then create different sound environments and instruments. Fragments of a City's sound is characterized by the very eighties-like sound of the Korg MS10 synthesizer and Roland's TR 606 (Drumatix) rhythm box. Today I don't have the original instruments, but I have Behringer's MS20 clone K2 and Roland's TR 606 clone TR06. This gave me the opportunity to add new material with the same characteristic eighties-like sound with better sound-quality than the old cassette tape.

In addition, I have used a lot of short- and long-wave radio, which also gives a feeling of something distant, dusty and old-fashioned. On 2+2=5 I used a photo I took in 1984 from the Port of Copenhagen to create the sound.