CD – Gruenrekorder

In almost twenty years of reviewing audio art and experimental music for Neural I have run into several extremely ‘tough’ projects that cross a broad range of styles, formats and media. In the newsroom was the prevailing belief that we were ready for anything. It seems we were not – in fact, we never imagined we could encounter an album such as this – one that cannot but produce a wry grin in response. The project consists of only descriptions of the locations and times of the recordings captured, their duration and information regarding their subsequent deletion. Over time we have come across many very odd projects (some perhaps more terrifying and radical than this one). What remains here is an elegant booklet, proof of the procedure of recording certain spatio-temporal locations and the destruction of audio material ultimately transmuted into script. The authors point out that the choice of locations was purely personal and did not follow any systematic interests. In light of this, the stressing of the correct name of Franz Kafka as opposed to Frank Kafka on the paper of rectification, seems to us a bit suspicious and cryptic, seemingly referring to some extreme and paradoxical situation. In the introduction notes Georg Imdahl underlines that “something has happened” and concretely the “logs” of Series Invisible remind us of the places, people, events, “not last the self-emptying of the world and of the defeated life”: a kind of oblivion that is in some part detached from existence.