The title In Formation (Neukölln) contains a beautifully accurate little machine of meanings. It identifies the Berlin district in which Michael Renkel has lived and worked, but “in formation” also describes music whose identity is continuously being assembled before us. Nothing here settles long enough to become a fixed object. A scrape becomes a vibration, a vibration acquires an electronic shadow, and that shadow begins pressing against another layer until the entire sound field changes shape. Recorded during a performance at TOTAL Artspace in Berlin on October 10, 2008, this twenty-two-minute collaboration between London sound artist Phil Julian and Berlin guitarist, composer, and electronic musician Michael Renkel captures two improvisers working not with conventional instrumental voices but with systems of unstable physical relationships. Their materials are recognizably humble: wood, strings, stones, springs, abrasive paper, elastic bands, metal foil, mallets, bottle necks, microphones, oscillators, effect pedals, and computer processing. What emerges from those objects, however, sounds less like a collection of devices than a small artificial ecology learning how to breathe.
Julian, who had spent the previous decade working primarily under the Cheapmachines name, uses contact microphones, surfaces, loose objects, test oscillators, white noise, pitch shifting, and electronics. Contact microphones are central to his practice because they bypass the ordinary air surrounding an object and listen directly to vibration traveling through its material. A surface therefore stops being passive scenery and becomes an instrument with its own internal geography. Grain, pressure, friction, and resonance are enlarged until microscopic physical actions become enormous acoustic events. Sandpaper can generate a dense mineral hiss; stretched elastic can become an unstable low-frequency pulse; foil and springs produce brittle metallic activity whose origin quickly becomes difficult to identify. Julian’s electronics do not merely decorate these sounds afterward. They extend and destabilize them, allowing the smallest touch to enter a feedback system where its proportions, duration, and apparent distance can be transformed.
Renkel’s amplified stringboard is an equally fascinating invention. The instrument is a wooden tablet fitted with several families of strings, including guitar and bass strings, a tremolo system, and strings mounted across a violin bridge, all captured through pickups and contact microphones. E-bows, mallets, stones, abrasive paper, bottle necks, short-circuited effects, and other preparations activate the structure. Its separate signals travel through a mixer, effects processing, and a computer running a MAX/MSP patch. The stringboard is related to the guitar but liberated from the guitar’s inherited shape and social history. There is no need to form chords, articulate notes cleanly, or maintain the gestures associated with concert technique. The instrument becomes a laboratory in which string tension, wood resonance, electromagnetic sustain, percussion, amplification, and software can interact. Renkel’s background in classical guitar remains quietly relevant because his work repeatedly investigates how far the physical and conceptual boundaries of that instrument can be stretched before “guitar” becomes only a distant ancestral memory.
The meeting between Julian and Renkel is compelling because their setups overlap without becoming identical. Both musicians use contact microphones, found materials, unstable electronics, and surfaces whose behavior cannot be completely controlled. Yet Julian often seems to approach the performance from the exterior of objects, discovering the violent or delicate signals hidden inside apparently insignificant matter, while Renkel’s stringboard acts as a compact instrumental organism with several connected nervous systems. Their sounds merge so thoroughly that assigning individual events soon becomes impossible. This confusion is not a failure of definition but one of the music’s principal achievements. The collaboration does not resemble two soloists taking turns or cautiously leaving polite spaces for one another. It feels more like two networks becoming entangled, each action modifying the conditions under which the next action will occur.
In Formation begins in a world of restrained friction and unstable detail. Thin electronic tones, rubbed textures, miniature impacts, and fragments of resonance appear without offering a clear hierarchy. Some sounds sit close to the ear, dry and tactile, while others hover at a distance as faint electrical atmospheres. The apparent emptiness between events is active rather than vacant. Every pause creates anticipation because either musician may introduce a vibration capable of reorganizing the entire field. As the performance develops, the objects begin losing their recognizable identities. A scrape may stretch into something resembling radio interference; a struck string may produce a low electronic bloom; a cluster of brittle impacts can suddenly appear to possess rhythm without either performer establishing a beat. This uncertainty gives the piece its peculiar suspense. The listener is constantly hearing causes and consequences but cannot reliably determine which is which.
The performance is often associated with electroacoustic improvisation, yet that useful classification can make the music sound more academic and bloodless than it actually is. In Formation has abrasion, stubbornness, physical comedy, and occasional menace. The musicians sometimes seem to corner one another with sound, introducing rough textures that demand an immediate structural response. At other moments they withdraw almost simultaneously, leaving behind a fragile electrical residue. The quieter passages make the eventual accumulations feel heavier because the duo refuses to maintain a continuous carpet of activity. Tension comes from decisions: whether to answer an event, interrupt it, reinforce it, distort it, or allow it to decay. This is improvisation as shared material thinking, conducted through fingers, circuitry, surfaces, and the unpredictable behavior of amplified objects.
During the final portion, a darker pulse begins to infiltrate the music. It does not arrive with the certainty of a programmed rhythm. It appears almost accidentally, then acquires enough weight to alter everything surrounding it. The earlier scrapes, ticks, and granular noises now seem to orbit a concealed mechanical body. This is one of the performance’s strongest transformations because it develops without announcing itself as a climax. The duo never abandons ambiguity for spectacle, yet the atmosphere becomes increasingly compressed and threatening. What began as an investigation of tiny physical phenomena gradually suggests machinery operating behind a wall, an approaching procession, or an electrical system developing intentions independent of its operators. Even here the music resists a decisive explosion. Its power lies in making the possibility of eruption more vivid than an eruption itself.
Homophoni’s original free online release was particularly suitable for a performance of this length and character. At just under twenty-three minutes, In Formation does not pretend to be an album-length statement or inflate itself with unnecessary companion pieces. It preserves one concentrated encounter in one room on one day. That modest scale allows the recording to function as both composition and document: a complete arc of sound, but also evidence of a temporary physical arrangement that ceased to exist when Julian packed away his contact microphones and Renkel disconnected the stringboard. More than fifteen years later, the music has not become easier to classify. Its textures still occupy a productive borderland between instrument and object, intention and accident, acoustic movement and electronic transformation. Anyone who attended TOTAL Artspace, encountered this original Homophoni edition, or knows more about the room and circumstances of the recording is warmly invited to add another layer to the formation.
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