Big Picture was comissioned by MARS festival, Los Angeles, 2018.
The material for Big Picture was collected during a one hour recording of global internet radio stations. Subsequently the sounds were interwoven with instrumental textures and doubled by them, forming five different movements.
I. „J’ai envie de manger tous les gâteaux“
II. Mallsoft
III. Cat Ramen
IV. At the rally
V. „I have no strong objection to champagne“
New recording of Big Picture by Ensemble Garage and Soetkin Elbers in June 2021.
Julian Kämper on Big Picture:
Big Picture is compiled from interlinked topoi that congeal, over its five sections, into what the composer calls a “global mood-painting”. There are stylistic borrowings from Ravel, who himself drew on traditional Chinese music, as well as quotations from Toto, Mladen Franko and Donald Trump, and advertisements for wine, champagne and ramen – always multi-layered, because the originals are mingled with their reproductions and third-party exploitations. Associations from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner of 1982, set in the Los Angeles of 2019, are doubtless intentional: LA, after all, is the city where Big Picture was commissioned and composed, and where von Lilienstern stayed at the Villa Aurora on a scholarship. Most of its sound segments were captured on 20 July 2018 during an hour-long recording of worldwide web radio stations. There was, in short, a mass of collected material, which the composer sorted by topic in a process of “listening work”. The intermingling of disparate materials is not a concept designed merely to generate contradictions; the relations between the sounds must also, and necessarily, yield an audibly interesting synthesis. What is decisive is how the collected material is formally organised.
Big Picture makes especially tight-knit use of a key compositional device that also governs the other pieces: collage. This technique enables temporal leaps, changes of location and the juxtaposition of contrasting sonic idioms, aesthetics and styles.