Andy Guhl

Featuring: Franz Hautzinger, Yan Jun, Jonas Kocher, Gaudenz Badrutt, Julian Sartorius, Jean Richard

Andy Guhl’s career as an improvisational musician went from strength to strength in the 1970s but it wasn’t until 1983 that the Swiss experimenter and architect stopped using any traditional instruments in order to embrace electronic collage, a technique that incorporates the use of modified radios, turntables, transmitters and other objects in a sort of ante-litteram circuit-bending. A similar approach emerged in collaboration with Norbert Möslang as part of Voice Crack, a collective active from the mid-eighties until 2005. However, the recently released 12 ” double vinyl does not take this creative phase into consideration, instead focusing on works produced in collaborations with Julian Sartorius, Franz Hautzinger, Charles Uzor, Richard Jean and Yan Jun. Three short compositions are also added by Gaudenz Badrutt and Jonas Kocher. The rather raw and experimental materials of yesteryear become the starting point for a series of new research, establishing a surprising dialogue between archive and improvisation. The past functions as a score and a field of research for new destinations of which no experience is yet available.

The recordings were made as part of the Resonance Rooms – Laboratory for the Transformation of Traditional Music Play exhibition at the Galleria Edizioni Periferia in Lucerne. The eight concerts on display were the starting point for the development of the double album, a production for which the invited musicians still used vintage instruments. The record release is presented as a coherent extension of the paper monograph Ear Lights, Eye Sounds (2014), an edition awarded the Swiss Design Award – a publication that recognizes density, communion of contents and design. A testimony to style and culture that, similar to the fragility of certain musically unravelled sounds and sequences, is ethereally imprinted on a special type of touch-sensitive paper, which is easily scratched and deteriorates. The result is a poignant metaphor of a whole career and a life, lived by handling precious sensibilities.