Book + plaster – Moozak

Bruchstücke, the fifteenth release on Moozak, is not printed on vinyl, as one would normally expect from a 7″. Instead, each record is different, made in plaster, in different shades of grey and black, resulting in a rough and edgy feeling, heavy, yet fragile and delicate. The release is physical, no digital files are available. Moozak emphasize that the purchase method is exclusively by mail shipping and most likely the disc will arrive broken to the recipient with an attached booklet containing a text by Lona Gaikis and photographs by Markus Gradwohl. Bruchstücke is published in a limited edition of 20 copies. The sounds on the record are concrete: glass, stone, metal, wood and other materials that burst, break and, in doing so, transfer their own acoustic quality to the arrangement. Each copy is handmade by Salzmann himself and sent with a signed and numbered Polaroid. This gesture lies on the border with contemporary art, where such an artefact fits perfectly into the category of artist multiples or limited editions. Here, however, we are dealing with a record release, a label focused on experimental music and a composer who habitually reflects on the materiality of sound. Salzmann is as at ease evaluating auditory phenomena in the social sphere. The interaction between sound and the visual arts gives a distinctive aura to the work. The fragments are proof for Salzmann that “whenever something breaks, something new begins” and so the recipient has the opportunity to reconstruct the broken pieces with a specially provided, making the points of rupture an integral part of the composition. Is it still possible to define such an approach as musical? Is this a particular type of conceptual art? We are in a liminal area in which our understanding of musical composition is challenged. In an operation of this type some of the most interesting suggestions of the modern avant-garde are collected, impulses that still produce a short circuit of our perceptions and thoughts.