Kg Augenstern: Circles and Cycles (Tentacles in Sicily – scratching the surface)
Gruenrekorder

Daniel Kötter & Hannes Seidl: Stadt (Land Fluss)
Gruenrekorder

It's a safe bet no one else's artistic practice is quite the same as Kg Augenstern's. Operating under the alias, Christiane Prehn and Wolfgang Meyer use custom-designed “tentacles,” in simplest terms extendable fibreglass canes that from a fixed position scratch surfaces in circles, to generate audio documents of physical settings. For their second Kg Augenstern release on Gruenrekorder (the first 2016's Tentacles), the Berlin-based duo decamped to Sicily in autumn 2019 to collect recordings of ten abandoned places, including an old prayer hall in Palermo that was used for a site-specific audiovisual display of the project. In addition to the audio component, the release includes images captured by a camera installed in the centre of the circles as scratchings were made. No humans appear in the photos; instead, there are ruins that in their decaying condition retain the residual trace of their creators. For each location, two pages of photos show the site itself; two subsequent pages show the tentacle reaching onto the surface.

Issued as part of Gruenrekorder's field recording series, Circles and Cycles is a field recordings release but with a difference: whereas the typical recording captures sounds at a location without physically touching anything, Kg Augenstern's thirty-eight-minute document adds a literal tactile dimension. To describe the scratching device as as prosthetic for the artists (and by extension for the listener) isn't inaccurate.

The first location explored is a ‘60s-built lido whose surfaces are scratched against a backdrop of distant sea sounds. In the tracks that follow, recordings are made at a mountain village (Cunziria), an old castle-like villa (Castello del Duca di Misterbianco), furniture store (Sicilmobile), brick factory (Fornace Penna), borgo (Borgo Rizzo), freight-forwarding company (Transporti Avimec), and prayer hall (the former Oratory of Santa Maria del Sabato). The scratching of multiple surfaces (tiles, sand, clay, rubbish, wood, gravel, stones, concrete, glass, etc.) generates rustling, screeching, and scurrying noises; background details are also audible, with everything from traffic and birds to sheep and even a football match surfacing. The project also includes recordings derived from raw sheep's wool, which covered parts of the floor at the prayer hall.

Circles and Cycles is less a traditional CD release and more exhibition catalogue, given its presentation: a book containing texts, photos, and, tucked inside the back cover, the CD. Details about the sites, their histories, and the specific places where the scratchings occurred bring clarity to the soundings and help the listener visualize the tentacle moving across the different surfaces (we also learn that at the brick factory, a lizard attempted to attack the tentacle as it scratched).

Adventurous too is Stadt (Land Fluss) by media artist Daniel Kötter and composer Hannes Seidl. Pitched as a “radio play on the sound of the city,” the single-track release blends music (Sebastian Berweck, Martin Lorenz, Andrea Neumann) and electromagnetic sounds (Christina Kubisch) with text Kötter and Seidl developed using quoted material by David Harvey, Kathrin Wildner, Thorsten Fausch, and others. Presentation is again striking, with the CD attached to a cardboard base tucked inside a sixteen-page booklet showing the speakers' words plus photos of the piece being performed and attendees listening to the material on headphones.

During the forty-two-minute presentation, multiple speakers pontificate on urban matters and proposed modifications to the city structure, the work amounting to a town council session about the form future living might take. In combining elements as it does, Stadt (Land Fluss) could be described as a sound collage; unlike some works of that kind, however, Kötter and Seidl's eschews abrupt collisions for a smooth flow, with electronics, environmental elements, planes, and voices arranged into a fluid, ever-mutating flow. English and German speakers appear, sometimes overlapping, with the sound design never so dominant it obscures the clarity of their words.

Issues of trade, tourism, industrial development, financing, public spaces, policing, urban control, socialism, and identity arise as historical cases are referenced to strengthen positions (Haussmann in Paris and mobilizations in Argentina as examples). Details accumulate to form a dense stream of electronic and real-world sounds, the texts less converging into shared viewpoints but instead accentuating the vast number of perspectives that emerge when such issues are broached—more questions than answers, in other words. Perhaps that's one reason why the sound design seems to grow denser as the piece progresses, with the buzzing mix perhaps intimating that positions lose ground when they multiply so abundantly. As the work's end approaches, the speakers tellingly recede from view and the city as a bustling, sprawling organism takes over, almost as if it's got a mind of its own.

Are Circles and Cycles and Stadt (Land Fluss) musical works? Not in any conventional sense, yet they are music, albeit strange music, of a particular kind—they're Gruenrekorder projects after all, and one would be naive to expect anything but something unusual from this always compelling label.

February 2021