Angélica Castelló: Catorce reflexiones sobre el fin
Gruenrekorder

Hannes Seidl: Befreit die Maschinen
Gruenrekorder

Both of these recent 'Sound Art Series' releases from Gruenrekorder embody the label's experimental aesthetic and forward-thinking sensibility, the first from Mexico City-born and Austria-based sound artist Angelica Castelló and the second Bremen-born and Frankfurt-based Hannes Seidl. Whereas Castelló's fifty-four-minute Catorce reflexiones sobre el fin (Fourteen Reflections on the End) spreads fourteen electroacoustic miniatures across two vinyl sides, Seidl's Befreit die Maschinen (Liberate the Machines) presents its forty-two-minute ‘Radio drama' as a single-track CD, each release available in 300 physical copies.

Castelló's functions effectively as a standalone recording, but it actually originated out of a 2019 sound art exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico; in the presentation, recordings were coupled with fourteen magnetic tape-woven bodies hanging in space (photos at her site show one such body hanging from a tree limb). Inspiration for the project came from French medieval poet Guillaume de Machaut, and specifically his words, “My end is my beginning and my beginning is my end” (reminiscent of “In my beginning is my end” from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets). Castelló uses the text as a springboard for self-referential ruminations on memory, death, entropy, “the return that is always renewed [and] the beginning, as an inevitable mirror of the end itself.” While all bodies inevitably decay and die, they're reborn too, albeit in a different form.

The sound artist in this case subjected field and voice recordings, radio and cassette devices, and a paetzold recorder to various manipulations to render the fourteen settings into their presented form. On the A side, glassy drones, bird chirps, and breaking glass noises engage the attention in “Rómpeme,” the activity level high but also portending the intense action to come. The onset of “Ira” brings with it granular transmissions, industrial noise, and a general sense of turbulence. Churning rhythms suggest the presence of machinery relentlessly burrowing into the ground. Peacefulness sets in thereafter, with high-pitched tones whistling alongside soft voice utterances. Blustery breezes, voice babble, and breaking waves merge thereafter into a disorienting stream as the programme perpetuates its alternation between soothing and aggressive episodes. Squeaks and squeals appear amidst gentle vocalizations, cicada thrum, bell rustlings, and dog barks. The flip side advances through haunted harpsichord- and tinkling piano-driven passages, weird folk detours, bell tolls, crackle-smeared conversations, and other synapse-firing moments. Even though the pieces are individually titled, the album plays like an impossible-to-predict phantasmagoria that unfolds largely without pause and fluctuates between moments soothing and unsettling.

In Befreit die Maschinen, Seidl meditates on a number of ideas, including the one that promised automation would free us from the drudgery of repetitive labour to devote time and energy to higher pursuits. Related to that is the fact that digital technologies have made music production possible for a greater number of people. Yet given that people are still working as much today as before, that anticipated future now begins to seem like a naive delusion. To explore such themes in his 2021 radio piece, Seidl used various computer programs to generate sounds and then augmented them with samples from a 2016 lecture by philosopher Michael Hirsch, “Die Überwindung der Arbeitsgesellschaft. Eine politische Philosophie der Arbeit” (“Overcoming the Labour Society. A Political Philosophy of Labour”). Consistent with the content Seidl wished to explore in the work, Hirsch's lecture visualizes a society where labour and payment are separated, resulting in “less work so that everyone can work and live better.”

September 2023