Gerald Fiebig feat. EMERGE & Christian Z. Müller: Gasworks
Gruenrekorder

Issued in a 500-copy CD edition, Gasworks collects five works Gerald Fiebig (b. 1973) created at the former gasworks in Augsburg-Oberhausen, two of them respective collaborations with EMERGE and Christian Z. Müller. With the site the focus of Fiebig's artistic practice for more than a decade, it's a space he's come to know intimately, and the pieces, created between 2010 and 2016, reflect a broad range of explorations, including a live improvisation performed in the echo chamber of the large gas tank, processed recordings of the sounds of gas and industrial equipment, and a sound installation piece built around a 2007 interview with the late Johann Artner, a gasworks employee from 1947 to 1989. Its large metal tank, eighty-four metres high and forty-five in diameter, has afforded the Augsburg-based sound artist a wealth of reverberative sound possibilities to work with.

In liner notes, Fiebig provides helpful context and historical background for the sixty-eight-minute recording. Initially opened in 1915, the gasworks initially symbolized the heroic promise of the industrial age, even if the conditions of the underpaid employees (as described by Artner) offer a less idealized portrait. With the 2019 re-opening of the site as an arts centre with once-dirty factory floors now a distant memory, the gasworks would seem to have entered a post-industrial age, even if Fiebig sees evidence of exploitative capitalism at work in the outsourcing of site-related technological production to poorer countries.

A sixteen-minute excerpt of a 2014 sound installation, “post-industrial” blends sounds of a metal tool factory with those of hissing gas from a kitchen stove, the former processed by EMERGE and the latter by Fiebig. With blurry whorls of static and hiss gusting insistently at the level of a controlled howl, the result is as close to catnip for industrial ambient fans as could be imagined. It's not static either, as different textures and treatments surface (some buried so deeply within the mass they're almost inaudible) throughout the piece and keep the listener engaged. Documents of 2016 live improvisations Fiebig performed within the space, “Ohrentauchen mit Echolot” appears as two separate tracks, one eight minutes and the other three. Positioning himself at the centre of the chamber, he used tools, toys, instruments, as well as his voice, body, and the room as acoustic sound-generators. With what sounds like the drizzle of rain in the background, the whoop of a slide whistle and pluck of a thumb piano appear alongside the echoing detonations of struck surfaces in the first version.

With the interview excerpts of Artner presented exclusively in German, listeners not fluent in the language will experience the twenty-six-minute “Nach der Industrie” on sound-only terms (available at Fiebig's site is an English translation of the interview, in which Artner recounts his days as a locksmith, welder, and foreman and discusses, among other things, the camaraderie between workers, working methods, and health hazards such as getting covered with tar and coughing up black dust). Though Artner's voice is the primary element, it's augmented by processed sounds of gas from a kitchen stove and consequently listening interest is upheld, even if one possesses no command of the German tongue (one phrase in particular, in English “But it's all just trifles like these,” recurs throughout and is subjected to multiple manipulations by Fiebig).

May 2019