A diary in sound of 74 days, documented by Polaroid photos and Dieter Roth’s corresponding diary entries. Bilingual English/German. Essays by Peter Kraut, William Furlong, Gianni Paravicini. 312 pages.
Harmonica Curse is a fascinating long-term diary that Dieter Roth kept in sound and images. In the year 1981, far away in Iceland, the artist played 74 times for an hour on his accordion. He recorded this improvised music on cassette each time. The result is a set of 74 cassettes that Roth made into an edition along with Polaroid photos of his immediate environment. This intimate musical and photographic work, Harmonica Curse, is at one and the same time a private musical archive and a conceptual series that had remained unknown in its complete form until today. This work has now been published for the first-ever time, its contents researched in full, and ordered chronologically. The audio and photographic documents are here accompanied by Roth’s diary entries from this time. The 74 cassettes of Harmonic Curse have also been digitized in their entirety and can be heard by accessing an external server. Harmonica Curse is a unique document of the life and work of Dieter Roth.
The accompanying texts by William Furlong, who was a close musical companion of the artist, and Peter Kraut, offer insights into the creation of this extraordinary work and its long-lasting echoes.