My composition is inspired by the fantastic short story The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. He describes an imaginary (although not imaginable) architecture of a vast library, consisting of an infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

On four walls of each gallery, there are bookshelves with books containing everything that has already been written or could be written by the variation of basic characters.

The other two walls are open and connect all galleries horizontally; spiral stairways connect them vertically.

My composition could be heard as a sometimes melancholic trip of the quartet through the labyrinth of some imaginary musical galleries, containing different variations of the same musical material. Or the quartet could be heard as a consistent musical room with imaginary reflecting walls in a desert, overlapped by moving musical spaces.

The sound material of the four loudspeakers alongside the members of the quartet on stage, was synthesized out of electric guitar recordings.

open room in overlapping spaces was produced 2013 at ZKM Karlsruhe (Center for Art and Media) Institute for Music and Acoustics.

Matthias Ockert