LP – Aposiopèse

Andrea Borghi manipulates VHS tapes and recorders without showing any nostalgia for the films that may have been played on these technologies. Instead, his focus is on the mechanical sounds that these media forms produce. He collects hisses, clicks, glitches, and occasionally, short extracts from the original sources recorded on the tapes – all fragmented, yet somehow familiar sounds that are expertly edited together using digital software to produce something compelling and intense. Since the 1960s, Pal and Secam – together with American NTSC – have been the standards for colour codification in analog television. As with VHS videorecording system, these standards have gradually become more obsolete. Kipples, according to Philip K. Dick, are useless objects that have lost their original functionality and purpose. In Palsecam, retromania has been completed, enhanced by the recovery of the objet d’art as something previously dismissed – the détourned technology takes its last breaths following a final inappropriate usage. The eight compositions on this release are pushed to their audible limits – somewhere between sound and matter, evoking a tactile quality that highlights the Tuscan experimenter as a refined artist who can easily navigate through diverse electroacoustic fields. Apart from the first which is six minutes long, the tracks are all quite short, some of them are drafts, others an exercise in style situated somewhere between melancholy and experimentation, a fetishistic regret for analogue’s passing and a passion for electronic bricolage directed towards multidisciplinary research. Palescam deals with the archeology of ‘new’ media offering an analysis of innovative processes, which were once timeless, but in reality, have had a beginning and now, an end.

 

Andrea Borghi – Palsecam