HEIZKRAFTWERK MOABEAT explores the visuals and soundscapes of inhuman,
but man-made, industrial structures.
but man-made, industrial structures.
A core memory that drove me to this topic was when I was biking through Treptower Park and heard the ungodly noises that were made by the Heizkraftwerk Klingenberg on the other side of the Spree.
I originally wanted to tape its sounds, but it has since been upgraded to using gas instead of coal, so the sounds are gone...
I originally wanted to tape its sounds, but it has since been upgraded to using gas instead of coal, so the sounds are gone...
Luckily (not for our climate of course, but for my project), the Heizkraftwerk Moabit still uses coal, so it still sounds just like HKW Klingenberg used to sound! So I made a little field trip & recorded various sounds from there with my smartphone.
Full Music Video
For the musical piece, my original inspiration was Musique Concrete and I wanted to only use recorded sounds in the song. In order to enhance my sound palette, I also recorded some sounds from my kitchen, i.e. me kicking my oven or banging metal bowls. I made sure to only use metallic objects for this, so it will sound like machinery. However, when I continued working on the project, I always missed rhythm or a beat of some sort. So during the process I started drifting more towards an industrial techno sound, as this was just really fun to work with for me.
The visual centrepiece is the torus knot, which distorts and pulses in sync with the music, almost dancing. I wrote a custom shader material which distorts the vertex position by looking at different sections of the frequency spectrum in the music piece.
My goal was to suck viewers into this abstract world of HEIZKRAFTWERK MOABEAT I wanted to highlight that even the nastiest and ugliest structures, like heat/power plants, can have some beautiful, beating hearts within them & encourage my viewers to look for the beauty and rhythms around us, especially in everything we claim as "ugly". (And, uh, I still really hope that we can stop burning coal soon...)