ATTACK DECAY SUSTAIN at TUNE / Haus der Kunst
ATTACK DECAY SUSTAIN is a new multi-channel audio installation by musician and composer Beni Brachtel, commissioned for the Tune sound programme and the Terrace Hall. It will be installed for six months from the 12th December, and in September the artist will present a live adaption of the sound installation across two evenings of performances that complement each other. The work features the cello section of the Munich Symphony Orchestra and marks a continuation of Brachtel’s collaboration with them that started in 2024 when he composed and recorded his Orchestral Suite „Monument eines unbekannten Menschen“ for Ersan Mondtag‘s contribution for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024.
On the first evening, the cello section of the Munich Symphony Orchestra performs Attack Decay Sustain. In contrast, the second evening, called Ode to Unpossible Musics, celebrates and cultivates the positive forces in music. The same musicians will perform a selection of Brachtel’s own compositions.
Friday 12th September
ATTACK DECAY SUSTAIN - LIVE
Every acoustic event has a moment in time: It begins, it sounds, it ends. The temporal structure appears for example when shaping sounds on a synthesizer: the initial swelling (attack), the sound subsiding (decay), the holding of the sound (sustain), and the resonance after the sound has been played (release).
The work examines the literal meaning of these phases. The function of the word is removed from its technical context in order to be metaphorically linked back to its own area of application, music-making itself.
ATTACK: Eight cellos were crushed one after the other using a manual hydraulic press. DECAY: The recorded sound of the destruction of the instruments serves as an audio score for interpretation by eight cellists from the Munich Symphony Orchestra. SUSTAIN: The dialogue of the instruments being destroyed and their live-interpretation are woven together into a new body of sound.
Saturday 13th September
Ode to Unpossible Musics
As a composer, Brachtel is often concerned with allowing the music to speak for itself. While the work often emerges from troubled places, it retains a distinct power to elevate. This capacity to transport the material toward something not necessarily cheerful, but emotionally pure, is central. Listeners are invited to draw from it whatever resonates most deeply with them.
There is a particular magnetism in melancholia, a gravitational pull that many feel but rarely articulate. This attraction may stem from an intuitive understanding that naming such feelings too plainly risks being consumed by them.
Ode to Unpossible Musics explores themes that are often overlooked, dismissed, or quietly avoided, not out of ignorance, but often for personal, even unconscious reasons. It seeks that fragile balance point, where lightness and heaviness coexist – a kind of emotional tightrope that is both precarious and revealing.
As a creator, the deeper one leans into the gravitational fields of human emotion, the greater the risk, and the greater the discovery. This body of work is an ode to musical rollercoasters, to detours and digressions, to letting go and embracing the unresolved. It honours the beauty of what resists definition: the unpossible.