Bernd Schurer (born, Zurich, 1970) is a sound artist, researcher, and composer of electronic music living in Berlin for the last 18 years.
Schurer is one the absolute pioneers of extreme computer music amongst other mischievous and radical online activities in the nascent days of the internet.
In a long running and somewhat confrontational practice Schurer has explored physical and psychological experiences through computational formalization processes.
Soliloquy Synthesis was created in anticipation of his father’s passing.
The composition was presented in front of an intimate audience at the NNOI festival in Zernikow, Brandenburg, Germany, July 2025. A week after the anticipated event transpired.
Under twinkling stars and flickering fires, what was it good for? A game.
Gratitude to all you beautiful beings: Maria, Josef, Sonja, Alberto, Marcus, Renate, Eliane, Jason B, Simon B., Simon G., Miriam, Bettina, Michael, Robert, Randy, Chris J, Sabine, Mark, Stephan W and Marina.
credits
released March 26, 2026
Music by Bernd Schurer. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Cover Painting by Mark Harwood.
JANUS is a concept introduced by the French philosopher Michel Serres in his book “The Parasite” (1980). In the book, Serres uses the figure of the two-faced Roman god Janus as a metaphor for the ambiguity and multiplicity that characterizes our experience of reality.
According to Serres, JANUS represents a way of thinking that embraces contradictions, uncertainties, and the coexistence of opposites. JANUS thinking is characterized by its ability to hold together contradictory ideas and perspectives, and to move beyond binary thinking in order to embrace the complexity of the world.
JANUS thinking has been influential in a number of different areas of contemporary philosophy, including postmodernism, deconstruction, and critical theory. It has also been used as a way of thinking about the challenges of globalization and cultural diversity, as well as the role of technology in shaping our understanding of reality.
Janus is the ancient Roman god of beginnings, endings, transitions, doorways, and time, famously depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions—one to the past, one to the future. He oversees gates, passages, and the start of new cycles, making him crucial for new year celebrations (January is named after him) and rites of passage like weddings and births, symbolizing movement between states. Romans invoked him first in rituals, viewing him as a guardian of all transitions, from daily life to war and peace.
A Janus Bunch oscillator state comprises two distinct phases. The model can describe synchronisation between internal phases and external oscillators by coupling both internally and externally. This enables the phases to exhibit fascinating and intricate movements. Some of these compositions use networks of so-called Janus Oscillators as a reservoir of dynamic patterns. These patterns are audified by using auditory-display techniques coupled to dynamical FM/RM Synthesis algorithms organized in a 2-dimensional plane (each oscillator has several arbitrary XY coordinates).
Some experimental philosophical thoughts on “The Narrow.” started out as a conversation with ChatGPT about the Tritone Paradox in my computer music composition, Lacanian Sieve.
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1. Narrowness as a Constraint on the Symbolic
When a piece commits to one interval as its total structural horizon, the listener is placed in a space where symbolic differentiation is strictly limited. The Symbolic (in Lacanian terms) becomes a single axis—a filtration of all musical possibility through one cut, one relation, one “law.”
Psychologically, this produces:
A sense of cognitive claustrophobia: the mind searches for alternative relations, but the system refuses them.
A heightened awareness of micro-differences: the listener is forced into an obsessive, nearly analytic parsing of tiny variations.
A feeling of being “locked in”: as if the system only permits motion along a very tight corridor.
This can be described as epistemic narrowness: the world is small, but infinitely deep.
2. Tightness as Affective Constriction
The tritone carries centuries of ambiguity and tension, but without relying on tonal baggage you can emphasize its structural role: it is an interval that never fully relaxes. When it becomes the only possible gesture, a paradox emerges: the tension is constant, yet endlessly mutating.
This shapes the emotional field in the following ways:
Persistent non-resolution → a condition of suspended desire.
Pressure without release → an affective “tightness,” often experienced somatically (sternum, throat, solar plexus).
A narrowing of emotional bandwidth which paradoxically amplifies sensitivity—when all gestures compress around a single relation, small differences become emotionally charged.
You could describe this as affective torsion: the piece bends the listener inward rather than outward.
3. Narrowness as a Model of Psychic Repetition
A system rooted in a single interval, especially a dissonant and “unplaceable” one like the tritone, can be heard as a form of compulsion to repeat. Not repetition of identity, but repetition of difference within sameness—a hallmark of the unconscious.
This resonates with:
Obsessive thinking → circling around a single structuring absence.
Traumatic repetition → the return of something that cannot be metabolized.
The Real pressing through a closed Symbolic loop.
You can say: The music stages the psyche encountering an impossible limit, again and again, as if attempting to master it—but never doing so.
4. Narrowness as Spatial Metaphor: The Corridor, the Throat, the Aperture
Computer music often generates topologies rather than narratives. If the tritone is the only generative relation, the topology becomes narrow:
Like a long corridor that changes thickness, humidity, temperature, but never opens into a room.
A throat that constricts or dilates but never speaks.
A fissure or crack: the listener inhabits the inside of a fault line, not the outside.
Emotionally, this evokes:
Unheimlich tightness (the familiar inflected with the strange).
Anxiety without panic: the walls are close, but stable.
A beauty produced by proximity: microstructures become intimate, almost erotic.
You might call this spatialized affect: the emotional state is coextensive with the geometry of the interval.
5. Narrowness as Sonic Ethics: The Refusal of Abundance
By restricting the entire musical universe to tritone variations, the piece refuses abundance in favor of rigor, discipline, and radical minimality.
Psychologically, this can be interpreted as:
An ethics of renunciation: nothing is allowed except what the system permits.
A confrontation with lack rather than its concealment.
A purification of attention: the listener becomes aware not of what is present, but of what is missing.
This narrowness becomes ascetic, almost monastic—but with an underlying violence.
6. The Emotional Implication of Infinite Variation within Tight Bounds
Here the key is the infinite in tension with the narrow.
Because the tritone is the only interval, but it appears in limitless permutation:
The listener confronts infinity-in-a-sliver.
There is a vertigo of smallness: infinite depth but no lateral expansion.
This often produces a strange calm—resignation mixed with fascination.
Psychically, this mirrors:
The way obsession makes one detail inexhaustible.
The way desire attaches to a single object-cause (objet a) whose variations are limitless.
The way trauma lodges a world inside a single point.
The Quantussy is a five (5) petaled flower, each petal with oscirator, that creates a rhythm, that triggers quantizations of the movements of the other four oscirators. The Quantussy is thus both based on five (5), but four(4)… and its name also refers to Quantum Physics through its unique “double quantizing” of angular momentum.
Running at low frequencies, the Quantussy is intended to provide ample modulations for the various functions of the COCOs, through inputs “FLIP”, “SKIP”, and “SP.AF”, or “Speed Affect”. The Quantussy petals can also run at audio frequencies, as well as “Balcium” frequencies, depending on a toggle switch.
The center of the Quantussy merits some attention. There is a central indicator-lozenge of 15 Light Emitting Diodes, showing the “Spesal State” of the device. The Spesal State is controlled by touching the “Cercel Nodes”, thus preserving Ciat-Lonbarde’s motto of “touch-sensitive is best!”.
To preserve this precious jewel of silicon encased in finest woods, use patch cords to wire it up in its own self-reconfiguring spasms.
These vibrations, spasms, activities, all manifest in unique transpositions and flip-skips in your material, which is input via Mike, Synthin, or special High Impedance Piezoin. The COCO modules here have a generalized version of the DOLBY cargo-cult preamp, which includes a self-expander, and an other-puncher for maximum POP SENSATION MUSIC>
You see, on each COCO, there is a knob for INPUT as well as FEEDBA… These are the primary functions of the COCO, to take in sound and recirculate it through *8BIT* digital memory. These two functions INPUT and FEEDBA, depending on a toggle switch, can punch the others out to create monophonic articulations of time-layers in your material.
Blind Material Volume II is the companion album to Lacanian Sieve (domizil 52) by Bernd Schurer. The composition Vortexification, an unfinished “work of crisis”, is released on cassette tape solely to exist. The digital download includes additional sound materials generated similarly (Sieves in SC, see Xenakis, Roads et al) as those found on Lacanian Sieve.
What is it good for? A Game.
credits
released June 22, 2025
published by domizil 2025. all music by bernd schurer.
While doing some Media Archeology for the Coningentia book, I came across some odd recordings I made, mostly for radio diffusion, between 1993 and 2003. What would later be labeled as laptop music and glitches is indeed the technological dawn of an ongoing fascination with glitches, aesthetics of failures, broken music, and, of course, the occlusion of the heart in the rise of demonic cybernetic suns. It is sometimes wonderful to be in the bright position of life, where shadows cast light on the traveler´s path through obscurity.
There are pieces exploiting the sounds of a Lowrey Genie ´98 organ at my parent’s house while our cat Minou was sleeping in its Leslie cabinet, destroying microphones of my Papa´s dictaphone while attempting to record burning coal, damaging and glitching a minidisc recorder from water spill while capturing the sound of water dropping into the sink (sic!) or exploiting stuck MIDI notes on my Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer as a means of overcoming “the problem” of time and my personal inabilities to “compose correctly” and many more puerile adolescent philosophical tropes…
Thank you everyone at Editions Mego for reminding me how precious this all was, is, and will be.
Me for my part, do not, have not, and never will exist.
“If this music can be narrated, it resonates in the narrative. At least it has changed me physically, this narrated music. It modulates my waves, my relationship to the wind, to the medium of music. And if that is not proof for you, please. Then why should I help you any further? After all, I have other things to do. The wind has infected me. I have to devote myself to it.”
credits
released February 23, 2025
All music by Bernd Schurer. Published by domizil 2025. Text: Tim Zulauf
We owe the quasi-totality of our discoveries to our violences, to the exacerbation of our disequilibrium. Even God, insofar as he intrigues us, is not to be found in our most intimate depths, but rather at the exterior limit of our fever, at the precise point where, our rage coIliding with his, a shock results, an encounter that is equally ruinous for him and for us. Stricken with the malediction attached to acts, the violent man does nor force his nature, does not go beyond himself, except to furiously re-enter, as aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having raised them. There is no work that does not return against its author: the poem crushes the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. S ome form of self-destruction, responding to his vocation and accomplishing it, is at work in the core of history; only he saves himself who sacrifices gift s and talents in order that, disengaged from his quality as a man, he is able to strut into being. If I aspire to a metaphysical career there is no price at which I am able to protect my identity, however minute are the residues that remain, it is necessary that I liquidate them; just as, on the contrary, if I adventure into a role in history, the task that I take upon myself has to exasperate my faculties to the point where I splinter with them. One always perishes by the self that one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.
I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more?
Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?
There are people to whom gain is unimportant, who are hopelessly unhappy and lonely.
We are so closed to one another! And yet, were we to be totally open to each other, reading into the depths of our souls, how much of our destiny would we see?
We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence. Can there be any consolation at the last moment? This willingness to live and die in society is a mark of great deficiency. It is a thousand times preferable to die somewhere alone and abandoned so that you can die without melodramatic posturing, unseen by anyone.
I despise people who on their deathbed master themselves and adopt a pose in order to impress. Tears do not burn except in solitude.
Those who ask to be surrounded by friends when they die do so out of fear and inability to live their final moments alone.
They want to forget death at the moment of death. They lack infinite heroism. Why don’t they lock their door and suffer those maddening sensations with a lucidity and a fear beyond all limits?
We are so isolated from everything.
But isn’t everything equally inaccessible to us? The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death.
In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.
Netockas´ Thoughts while reading <the theory of the solitary sailor>, Gilles. Grelet, June 2024
