The author J. G. Ballard's novel Concrete Island (1973) deals with marginalization in contemporary society, which becomes cruel and difficult to defend oneself against if one happens to fall outside the spheres of normality, whether by coincidence or accident. In this book, Ballard describes a freeway system with a group of people, who although marooned in the freeway's physical midst, are nonetheless without means of accessing this communication machine. The paradoxen of the novel and the steel wires, which farmers in the remote parts of Norway use for sliding bales of hay down from the mountains into their barns, have inspired me to this work. There are nine different sets of golden strings, the string lengths having been determined by distances in the solar system. Visually, the strings rotate with slightly different speeds and angles.The sound results from physical modeling executed in the IRCAM program "Modalys", and the strings are "welded" together almost at the center, so that the shortest string is connected to the next-to-shortest string and so on.The strings are excited by recorded sections from Ballard's book, spectrally separated, with each slice exciting one string each. Each string in every set is excited by a different "sound slice", and when one string is excited, all strings resonate. The recorded sound sources are traffic noise, falling aluminium scrap pieces and voice from a reading of text fragments from Ballard's book Concrete Island. The orchestral sounding glissandi result from granulated traffic noise, and the deep rumbling sounds as well.

Joran Rudi (N) began his career in one of Norway's rock bands (Kjott) that emerged in the end of the 70's. Studies in music theory and composition at New York University (Master's Degree in Composition). Rudi has concentrated his work within the genre of electroacoustic music, computer music in particular. His list of workks contain, for the most part, compositions for electroacoustic instruments or tape, and he has composed for dance, film, multimedia and performance art as well.