Julia Bünnagel: Sounds Like…Vienna
Gruenrekorder

As ever, appearances deceive. A photo on the back cover of Sounds Like…Vienna shows Julia Bünnagel standing behind a DJ-like setup at an outdoors city space, an image that suggests the twelve-inch release could possibly be a dance-related release from Gruenrekorder. But anyone familiar with the experimental imprint knows it would never do something so, well, normal, and sure enough closer inspection reveals that the release is consistent with its other products. Bünnagel, you see, has created a recording that doesn't merely simulate the sound of the city, it is the city—or at least one representative part of it. For this project, she's created a record using slabs produced from molds of the city's sidewalk and streets; consequently, the sounds generated when the turntable's needle rides the disc's surface derive, literally, from Vienna's physical surfaces.

Tucked within the cover sleeve is a four-panel insert whose photos show her generating the impression for a disc from a sidewalk as well as an image seen from above of a slab on the Technics turntable. However provocative it might appear, such a project is business as usual for the Cologne-based sculptor, academic, sound performer, and installation artist, whose CV lists an impressive number of solo and group exhibitions, projects, and publications extending to 1999. She's also a member of the artist collective Sculptress of Sound, works with the sound art collective Berg/Bünnagel/Lautermann, and performs as a so-called Noise-DJane.

The twenty-two-minute vinyl release (300 copies) presents three untitled tracks. On the A-side, ambient sounds of traffic and people first establish the recording's outdoor location before the sound field's engulfed by textures. Thrumming whorls of grainy, rippling noise emerge, with the disc's revolutions creating rhythms that, through repetition, suggest some tangential connection to underground techno. Smears and tears collide as the material roars with bulldozer-like force, its rumbling hinting at the possibility of detonation. Cross-patterns of distressed noise advance and retreat until the ambient sounds of the intro return to provide a formally satisfying frame. Whereas the opening track on the flip side seethes from the first moment and rarely lets up thereafter, the slightly quieter second swells gradually, its swaying pulse bringing the club music dimension to the forefront. Like many a Gruenrekorder product, Sounds Like…Vienna extends one's understanding of what qualifies as music when the sounds sourced from Bünnagel's slabs exhibit a strangely musical quality. One imagines John Cage would thoroughly approve.

November 2020