LP – Gruenrekorder

The idea that a DJ set can be used to “physically” read the architectural structure of a city is certainly unusual and quite provocative. When we say “physically”, we literally mean creating an urban soundtrack from concrete disks specially created from pavement and road surface moulds. The city in question is Vienna and the artist who gives life to this project is Julia Bünnagel, a sound artist particularly at ease with installations and public interventions. In Sounds Like … Vienna the artist mixes together 12” audio samples recorded in the Austrian metropolis. In this unusual turntablism, the DJ’s technical equipment is challenged, but Bünnagel remains concentrated on the console in front of passers-by, who, on a gloomy Viennese morning, move past unaware of such a display of contemporary art. Julia Bünnagel has been involved in similar practices for more than twenty years, now as a member of the artists’ collective Sculptress of Sound, or interacting with the Berg / Bünnagel / Lautermann sound art collective. The tracks resulting from this performance and presented for Gruenrekorder are three in number and twenty-two minutes in total and without any title to characterize them. In the first of these recordings the context is evident, a station in an open urban space: traffic and pedestrian noises are heard all throughout the console, which is followed by the grainy sound of a scrolling turntable needle on rough and uneven asphalt. Some might argue that the asphalt of a street hardly sounds different from that of another street or square a few blocks away or even located in another city district. Surely it doesn’t offers much in the way of psychogeographic or architectural information? Perhaps what really resonates with Vienna is precisely the idea of ​​such a structured performance, full of avant-garde tensions redolent of the cultural substratum of the city, a great inspiration for the first performing art (Viennese Actionism). Despite this, Bünnagel also manages to bring out rhythmic structures from this setting, certainly not dancefloor sounds but “combat” sounds, paraphrasing a motto of the artist herself.

 

Julia Bünnagel – Sounds Like…Vienna