This vinyl LP stems from a series of performances by sound artists Mattin and Hong-Kai Wang. The recording consists of a superimposition of four layers of conversations between the two artists.
When artists collaborate, they collapse themselves—or that would be the promise, at least. They see their practice reflected in someone else's and they try to pass through the mirror. What Hong-Kai Wang and Mattin have attempted in this record, and these recordings, is to reflect on that process of reflection and to explore the possibilities of collapse.
Since December 2012, Hong-Kai and Mattin have been developing a dialogue focused on the material conditions in which they find themselves embedded as artists, using oral conversation as a formal expression. They started with a private one-hour conversation about their respective practices, which they recorded. Then in a sequence of live performances they incrementally layered their original conversation with more dialogues, all of which were duly recorded in turn, including the contributions (witting or otherwise) of their live audience. In the performances, both of them would listen to the previously recorded conversations on headphones, whilst simultaneously addressing the audience and each other in a sparse, ambiguously dialogic manner. The final result, which is not at all final, is a recording consisting of the four layers (temporalities) of conversations superimposed.
Excerpt from liner text by Mike Sperlinger
Mattin (Martin Artiach, born 1977 in Bilbao) is a sound artist working with noise and improvisation. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental sonic artistic production through live performance, recordings and writing. Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature and parameters of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of ”freedom”and constant innovation that it traditionally implies, and the established conventions of improvisation as a genre. Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between performers and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert situation, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He tries to expose the stereotypical relation between active performer and passive audience, producing a sense of strangeness and alienation that disturbs this relationship. He is currently doing a PhD at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of Ray Brassier and Josu Rekalde. He has edited with Anthony Iles the book Noise & Capitalism and in 2012 CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Uconsitituted Praxis, a book collecting Mattin's writing plus interviews and reviews from performances that he has been part of. Both books are available online.
Sound artist Hong-Kai Wang (born in Huwei, Taiwan, lives and works in Vienna and Taipei) is currently a PhD in Practice candidate and part of the Spaces of Commoning research team at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her works are concerned with the questions of geo-politics and invisible social organization within listening and construction of cultural memory, focused on a collaborative and process-driven approach to research and production. Wang has presented her works at Liquid Architecture (Melbourne/Sydney, 2014), Kunsthall Trondheim (Trondheim, Norway, 2013), Para Site (Hong Kong, 2013), Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2013), among others. Her work spans performance, workshop, text, video and installation.
