Dressed In Sound

Sharper Than A Needle unfolds as a sound space where textile machines transform into instruments. Silky basslines, delicate thread-like melodies, and a pulsating sewing machine synthesizer reveal surprising new tonal colors between noise, sound art, and experimental pop, as every movement of needles and every turn of spools takes on musical meaning. The project was initiated by Stephanie Müller and Klaus Erika Dietl, known for work such as Sewicide and beißpony, and for the international collective Alligator Gozaimasu. Their practice is closely connected to queer-feminist discourses that reimagine textile work as a political, aesthetic, and social tool—deconstructing traditional gender roles and work practices, enabling networking and collective intervention, and treating handcraft as a strategy of resistance that makes production conditions visible and explores alternative forms of collaboration.

The project is realized in collaboration with Karen Modrei and Stefan Wischnewski within the ensemble Dressed In Sound, alongside guest artists including dancer and performer Sema Schäffer—who also uses her wheelchair as an instrument—and video performer Licia Lumen, currently studying at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich under Prof. Hito Steyerl, as well as other members of the network Über die Textilie hinaus. In February 2025, Dressed In Sound performed for the first time to a sold-out audience at the Therese-Giehse-Halle of the Münchner Kammerspiele, and recordings from this premiere became a live album. The live LP is set for release on June 3, 2026, issued on the Rheinschallplatten label, and in a limited edition accompanied by a magaZINE (icon Verlag) with photographs by Florian Freund plus additional texts and images offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse.

The album’s cover artwork depicts a clothing moth (Tineola bisselliella), photographed by Ruedi Bryner, with a posture that invites a feminist reading—meeting the “adversary” of textile art with tenderness and highlighting its beauty amid external and social tensions. Its sound is tangible and physically present: Dietl’s spinning wheel hums with melancholic warmth, Wischnewski’s hand-operated sewing machine and tufting gun produce technoid pulses, and Müller’s treadle sewing machine evokes a small greenhouse where handcraft, organic materials, and sonic processes intertwine, while Modrei’s knitting machine adds precise rhythmic accents. Side A explores what is usually hidden—dirty laundry through water drips, microscopic shattering, and the scratch of magnetic strips—while Side B grows more corporeal, transforming a dressmaker’s dummy into a noise cello and turning interruptions, unpicking, and unlearning into deliberate offbeats; the artists also perform the line “send the fears packing and the fear of the fears,” an English adaptation of a poem by Mascha Kaleko. The live LP is structured as two continuous tracks without conventional cuts, emphasizing the duration and texture of labor, and features a driving coda by Colin Djukic (Zork Free Arts Lab) that both closes and extends the album.