A sound collage composed from 400 hours of recordings the artists made during the 2-year renovation of their house in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. The work has been previously presented as an installation of which photos are included on 3 inserts.
Daniela Fromberg and Stefan Roigk are multidisciplinary artists working at the borders between acousmatic sound collages, sculptures, installations and graphical scores, often combining different types of media into one single composition. Many of their works deal with fragments of everyday life that are presented in narrative stage-like installations.
One such work is "Unfamiliar Home" which began life in 2012 when the house the artists live in got renovated as part of a gentrification process in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. What used to be their home turned into an estranged hostile place that they were forced to inhabitate while the wooden windows were wrecked, the roof stripped, all plumbing ripped out and the whole 5-story building blindfolded in construction foil. During two years of living on a permanent construction site, the artists collected 400 hours of audio recordings of that novel sonic experience, out of which they formed a 12-channel mixed media installation with a sculpture made out of vintage wooden window sashes.
The installation "Unfamiliar Home" was presented at Ausland, Berlin in December 2018. This LP mix merges the original sound collage with on-site recordings of the installation. Sound sources: Tremors, hollow scratching, resonating gas-heaters, droning jackhammers, crumbling ceiling plaster, wind, chimney sweeping, blow torches, rustling plastic cover, elevator buzzing, dismantling of the scaffolding.
"The ephemeral sound of an urban Berlin—too soon to be history, when all vintage construction materials have fallen prey to real estate funds." (Daniela Fromberg & Stefan Roigk)
Edition of 200 with full-color outer sleeve, inner sleeve and 3 LP-sized inserts with photos of the installation.
Daniela Fromberg (born 1968 in Celle, Germany) develops a sculptural work essentially from "poor" or utilitarian everyday materials (natural products, food, found objects, discarded construction materials, papier-mâché, gelatin, etc.) to which she gives new life in spatial appropriations integrating sound, video, photography and performance.
Stefan Roigk (born 1974) is a sound artist based in Berlin. He studied fine art with a focus on sound art in Hannover under Professor Ulrich Eller. In his work, Roigk pursues the intermedial interweaving of sound collage, installation, musical graphics and text-sound composition. The resulting works approach sound as a field for artistic and aesthetic research, taking it as both their departure point and central medium. Roigk's artistic focus lies on the dynamic staging of context-related fragments of everyday existence, which he imbues, in the sense of visual music, with an extraordinarily developed, visually poetic formal language. In realizing these aims, Roigk uses compositional and deconstructivist techniques of collage and assemblage for the development of stage-like spatial compositions with an implicit underlying narrative sense, in which the diverse media blend together like the instruments of an orchestra. In his work, Roigk reflects on his own living and production conditions, while investigating the political potential of aurality and tracing the subjective construction of reality. Since 2010, he has worked regularly in co-operation with visual artist
Daniela Fromberg on intermedial installations and compositions.
Stefan Roigk has received numerous grants and awards, including a work stipend from Stiftung Kunstfonds, a research grant for fine art from the Berlin Senate, the BS project grant from the state of Lower Saxony as well as a nomination for the German Sound Art Award. His works have been performed internationally in the scope of numerous concerts and festivals, shown in solo and group exhibitions and published in the form of books and recorded media. His releases have appeared on notable outlets, including
Tochnit Aleph,
Edition Telemark, Argobooks, Revolver Publishing, Senufo Editions and Fragment Factory.
In addition to his work as a fine artist and composer, Roigk has curated concerts and performances at ausland, a collectively-run venue in Berlin, has been a member of the artist collective Errant Sound and has been involved in the art festival artspring.
He is involved in initiatives to shape cultural politics such as the bbk berlin and the Coalition of the Independent Arts. Furthermore, he lectures on the role of sound in the fine arts and, in 2009, co-founded, along with Daniela Fromberg, the multi-award-winning participatory cultural education project geräusch[mu'si:k], which is devoted to sound as a form of musical expression.
