Gregory Büttner 'Kaktus'

part 1 (8:15)
part 2 (2:56)
part 3 (5:03)
part 4 (6:55)
part 5 (3:25)


For this track I recorded the needles of a cactus played with my fingers. After some digital processings I edited them into a composition in 5 parts. In parts 3 and 5 the cactus recordings are combined and modulated with sinus-waves.

All music by Gregory Büttner, 2008-2009.

Listen: Kaktus_part4 excerpt




Antez / Mathieu Calleja / Miguel A. García / Artur Vidal 'Malasaña'

Nowadays, despite the increasing gentrification of the area of Malasaña, it remains a place well known for night-time unrest and counter-cultural disobedience.
This cultural climate draws parallels with the way improvised music relates to confrontation. Many musicians feel that improvised music clashes against, or is at odds with, social institutions, as in the case of Madrid, where modern or contemporary music is almost completely ignored by popular culture.
In this recording we can hear a different kind of confrontation. Musicians seem to be trying to fight, both against themselves and against the temptation of presenting what they already know. They seem to be seeking out strategies for creating music collectively, without falling back on cliché, imitation or cultural habits.
The listeners of this recording are invited to consider if the musicians have succeeded in this attempt. They are also encouraged to interrogate their own listening, as both a cultural practice shaped by social environment and as an area for a similar internal contest.


Héctor Rey 'Myxini'

Kvas (4:57)
Posaune (4:18)
Urojiise (4:48)
Perkele (5:44)
Mixino (5:09)

Recorded in Bilbao during the summer of 2012. No overdub.


REVIEWS:

THE SOUNDPROJECTOR (UK)
Hamburg composer Gregory Büttner continues his preoccupation with “small sounds”, this time producing his sound art using the needles of a cactus. His ‘Kaktus’ is a microscopic five-act play, using editing and sine waves to reconfigure the basic sounds he recorded of himself “playing” cactus needles, tweaking and flicking them with his delicate fingertips (he rents out his left pinky to the Hamburg-Eppendorf medical centre on weekends, where they use it as a surgical tool). I think it’s not unfitting that his photograph here depicts the shadow of a cactus, rather than the real thing. That’s because we’re hearing strangely transmuted phantoms of reality. Oddly enough, they continue to convey the true prickly essence of these green spiky bastards. I ought to know…when you get the prickles from one of these vengeful desert monsters, they’re with you for life. If Büttner cultivated a garden of these things, then it’s dollars to doughnuts he’d insist on Blossfeldia liliputana, the South American plant which has the distinction of being the smallest cactus in the world.
Ed Pinsent, thesoundprojector.com/2015/05/04/the-room-of-grey


VITAL WEEKLY (Dutch)
... The next CDR is by Gregory Büttner, who has five pieces of recordings he made with playing a cactus. These recordings were then treated with computer techniques and that's what we have here. This is something entirely different than the Malasana piece. Büttner operates within the field of microsound, and as such you can place him along the lines of Roel Meelkop or Marc Behrens. Sturdy investigations into the possibilities one sound source have to offer and create a varied set of compositions with that. The slightly high-pitched sound of the cactus is of course very much present here, along with time stretching and other forms of granular synthesis. Five excellent compositions and in no way I was thinking this sounded like a demo.
Frans de Waard, vitalweekly.net/948





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