Johann Diedrick
Johann Diedrick is an award-winning artist, engineer, and musician that makes installations, performances, and sculptures to experience the world through sonic encounters. He surfaces resonant histories of past interactions inscribed in material and embedded space, peeling back vibratory layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques through listening tours, workshops, and open-source hardware/software. He is the founder of A Quiet Life, a sonic engineering and research studio that designs and builds audio-related software and hardware products for revealing new sonic possibilities off the grid.
Is in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY. Looking to coexist with our climate crisis. Recording busy such as Greenpoint. Has a large creek going through with active aquatic life despite being an industrial district with waste in the water. He was inspired by this mixture of the harsh city and the wildlife in the forest for field recordings and sampling. Cerulean Waters is based on this. It’s based on these field recordings with other sounds playing over them, blending into each other to create its 13 minutes long soundscape.
Grew up with early computers and has always enjoyed experimenting with them.
Created a musical interface that uses your body. By standing on two plates, when two people touch the circuit, it is connected, and it plays a sound. The more you touch, the larger the voltage, which changes the pitch.
Invented The Harvester. This is a handled synth and sampler where you can record sounds around you and play them back on a musical scale. Moving it around affects the pitch. Also, put together workshops on how to make this.
Celeste is a radio art piece collaboration. They created a device to pick up the randomly scattered frequencies on the earth, sonifying atmospheric vibrations and emissions while also picking up frequencies from space, such as pulsars. Recorded a meteor shower with this device.
I really enjoyed his ideas and how he brought them together. Whilst a lot of his ideas, in theory, sound really experimental, he finalised them to sound more musical. His early fascination with computers can be heard in his works as he creates and uses a lot of electronics.
Something he spoke about that really got to me was his idea that bringing instruments off the grid (the grid of audio workstations and the grid of conventional life) allows new sonic possibilities and creative freedom. This is something I haven’t tried before and could sound intriguing for my EP, where I could, for example, record the piece in nature somewhere to get a different timbre, tone, soundscape and new ideas that I wouldn’t be able to create in my bedroom on Ableton.