CD – Soleilmoon

Nikola Tesla’s legacy is a symbolic device, a device that continues to radiate potential. His experiments do not remain confined to the domain of technique, but are articulated as thought in the form of energy, as hypotheses of other worlds in which electricity, sound and matter are conflated. It is in this tension between myth and unfinished project that Visible Sound: Nikola Tesla’s Mattergy is placed, a project that reactivates forgotten archives, historical resonances and technological imaginaries, bending them to a new aesthetics of listening. Here, the memory of marginal experiments – from CCD2, Dale Travous’s underground laboratory in Seattle, to the unbroadcast recordings of Mexico City’s Canal 4 – are transformed into acoustic material, bringing the echoes of unrealised scenarios back to the present. Mauricio Reyes and Carl Michael von Hausswolff, in dialogue with these materials, do not limit themselves to an archaeological approach: they cultivate the emergence of a disturbing, and still relevant, dimension of thought that, through sound, questions the linearity of technological history and opens up to the perception of an invisible, otherwise perspective. The listening experience moves between raw electrical outputs and layered sound fields, in which frequencies recorded decades ago are bent and recombined into new forms. The hypnotic hum of the reels reveals an acoustic landscape that alternates between industrial density and ethereal rarities, letting the living matter of magnetic tape emerge with its imperfections. These are not simple restored documents: the materials are transfigured, saturated, compressed and expanded, creating a continuum that vibrates with tension and instability. Reyes and von Hausswolff stage an electroacoustic dramaturgy that oscillates between attraction and menace, where the raw power of the signals coexists with moments of meditative suspense. It is a listening that demands attention and abandonment together, able to evoke both the experimental laboratory and a cosmic landscape, opening a space in which sound is not representation but material force, energy that acts. In this sense, Visible Sound: Nikola Tesla’s Mattergy brings fragments left buried to the surface and turns them into an experience that challenges the boundaries of music itself, placing itself in a liminal zone between sound art, historical research, and theoretical speculation. A work that continues the tradition of the most radical sound art, but with a narrative tension that makes the experience immersive and disturbing, as if those frequencies, born decades ago in a lab or TV studio, would find their ultimate destination today.

 

CM von Hausswolff, Mauricio Reyes – Visible Sound: Nikola Tesla’s Mattergy