Potemkin I: Baby Baby

A kind of "organized confusion" characterizes the music of Sebastian Claren (b. 1965). "The music should, so to speak, exist without preconditions and should initially refer only to itself. In my estimation, culture and good-breeding are completely out of place in a work of art," says Claren. In his music, this view assumes audible form in a constant alternation between continuity and discontinuity, whether consecutive or simultaneous. It is a game of sophisticated montage techniques involving myriad contrasting splices and a multitude of camera positions translated into music. Yet his stupendously energetic and sometimes highly volatile compositions are not montages in the strict sense; they are not concerned with reproducing things already said elsewhere. Claren is more interested in the dense synchronicity of (inner) events viewed from the vantage point of the self, the composer, who, of course, works with and within past and present-day music. Hence Claren's keen interest in certain styles of pop music, which are no less essential to his aesthetic than the roughly one-hundred years of modern music and its forerunners.