Long before the term »sound artist« was coined, Christina Kubisch was already working as one. Since the 1970s, she has been engaged with sound installations and electroacoustic composition. Now, at 78, she is making her album debut on Jan Jelinek’s label Faitiche. One does not necessarily need to know how the music on Tuning came into being, but context rarely hurts when it comes to listening.
For the three compositions, recorded between 2004 and 2024, Kubisch adopts a different approach each time. »Diapason« was recorded using 15 tuning forks; »Gaming In Silence« in the server rooms of Karlsruhe’s ZKM and its collection of vintage computer games; and »Two Persons Walking Through A Street In Madrid« during an »Electrical Walk« through Madrid – a walk in which electromagnetic waves are transformed into sound through special headphones. Kubisch makes the inaudible audible, the quiet loud, the non-musical musical. The result is a group of works that, quite apart from their spectacular methods of production, trace lines of connection to artists as different as John Cage, Brian Eno and Jim O’Rourke.
Tuning
