Pali Meursault's  offset is the exploration of the soundscape of a printing workshop, a journey in the depth of the mechanical and industrial energy of rotary presses. Composed from field recordings made in two different printing facilities (in Grenoble and Paris from November 2011 to February 2012), the work is deliberately situated in between the sound document about the over-determined environment of a work place and the electroacoustic recomposition/manipulation.

A series of variations on textures, rhythms, cycles and patterns formed by the producing and reproducing machines. Here, the soundscape is regarded as a social and cultural phenomenon as much as it is acoustic: the recorded matter is both the damaging and alienating by-product of the production process, and already holds a musical dimension, marked by a hundred years of mechanical fantasies, as cultivated by the Futurists, industrial music or techno. The issue, then, was to study how the noise of a machine becomes music as much as it was to understand how a musical culture produces an alternative listening of the environment.

The first side of offset explores the rhythmic patterns of mechanical “cycles”; the second focuses on “fluxes” and continuous phenomena. Co-realised by universinternational and doubtful sounds. Black vinyl, limited to 300 copies.

Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi.

Offset is the first LP in a trilogy focussing on the sound of machines with the 10’’ Mécanes (recording of a letter-pressing workshop) released by universinternational in 2016 and the LP { Press } (recording of a pressing plant in R.A.N.D. Muzik) released by Art Kill Art and universinterantional in 2020