vinyl LP – Staalplaat

When we talk about simulation in the field of contemporary audio experimentation and the complex relationship between analogue and digital, it is usually more common for it to be within the context of digital technology being used to recreate realistic sounds rather than analogue artefacts imitating synthetic ones. Motors / Ratchets from Jens Brand is an album that belongs in this unusual second category. Brand is a cross-media artist who lives and works in Berlin and is fascinated with the idea of creating acoustic sounds to have the same qualities as electronic ones. On this Staalplaat release, gears and ratchets are used to generate clicking tones. It’s a form of white noise, infinite clicks playing in unison with engines all controlled through a Max/MSP patch, and with the aid of some frequency regulators which meticulously modulate the resonance to produce dilated and distant loops. Although the recordings appear to be digital, they are fundamentally analogue, structured in a way as to articulate the artist’s dreams of wireless electronic music where volume is treated as a form of expression for the objects in question. Things are seldom as they seem. In this work, reality is challenged through the construction of an abnormal setting in which the artist establishes precise conditions – a special relationship with the spaces where these auditory events are cultivated in order to create a specific sound performance. The sounds that are produced are saturated with different elements. They are raw and bare yet give the impression of being synthetic. One of the theoretical cornerstones of the twentieth-century avant-garde movement is highlighted once again: the exploration of the dualism between the natural and the artificial, a relationship that is concerned with the transition from modernity to post-humanism.

 

Jens Brand – Motors / Ratchets