Straight Run is the portrait of Sergej Maingardt, a composer who takes his cues from social and political subjects and from the way a digitised, globalised world shapes perception and thought. Modern technology, pop-cultural references and noise elements bind his works together. The CD holds three pieces, part of a wider portrait of nine works that interrelate and comment on each other.
Maingardt, born in 1981, studied composition with Michael Beil at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne and media and cultural analysis at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Since the winter semester 2021/22 he has held a guest professorship for transdigital composition in Cologne, and in 2022 he was a fellow of the German Academy Villa Massimo at the Casa Baldi. Besides instrumental works with electronics he makes fixed-media pieces, interactive sound installations, works for VR headsets, video and stage works. Rush is played by the Bundesjugendorchester under Lothar Zagrosek, with Krisztián Palágyi on accordion and Tal Botvinik on electric guitar. The pianist Paulo Álvares performs Flower's silence in empty guns, with the composer at the live electronics. Declare Independence is played by Ensemble electronic ID: Dirk Rothbrust on drums, Daniel Marx on electric guitar, Constantin Herzog on electric double bass and Felix Knoblauch on synthesizer. The first piece is a production of the German Music Council, the other two and the online videos coproductions with Deutschlandfunk.
Rush is written for large orchestra, enlarged ensemble and electronics. Flower's silence in empty guns combines piano, live electronics and Wii sensors. Declare Independence, for drum set, electric guitar, electric bass and synthesizer, closes the album as a statement of artistic independence. Maingardt calls it a rebellion, meant to show that he is curious, always on the lookout and ready to set out for new shores.
The starting point of the wider portrait is SMOG (2012), whose sound is taken from the electromagnetic fields of computers, scanned and selected with solenoids. In the booklet, Egbert Hiller traces how the noise of SMOG leads to a continuum across all nine pieces, sometimes joined by pictorial noise. Six audiovisual works were made with the video artist Jens Standke. They move from distorted self-perception in social networks to the dismantling of pop and rock patterns in It's Britney, bitch! and HeroIn.
CD, Wergo WER 6437 2, released in 2022 in the German Music Council's Edition Zeitgenössische Musik, running 37 minutes.
