Soap&Skin

Sleep/Spiracle is the soundtrack to 4th Floor to Mildness, a 2016 video installation by Pipilotti Rist, with music and words by Anja Plaschg, the Austrian artist and musician who records as Soap&Skin. Rist, born in 1962, conceived the piece for the fourth floor of the New Museum in New York. Visitors lie on single and double beds and look up at two amoeba-shaped screens hanging from the ceiling, filled with footage shot largely underwater: drifting water plants, the artist's submerged face, fingers and feet, seen as if from a riverbed looking up at the surface. Rist calls her art a glorification of the wonder of evolution, and here she sets the shared attention of the cinema against the solitary glass of phones and tablets. The floating bodies also recall her 2005 ceiling projection for a Venetian church, an update of Baroque fresco imagery. In autumn 2018 the work travelled to London for Strange Days: Memories of the Future, the New Museum exhibition staged with The Store X and The Vinyl Factory at 180 The Strand, and this record was issued during the show.

Plaschg's music is what holds the projection together, and Discogs credits her with both the music and the text. On the record the soundtrack is split into two pieces, one per side, so it can be heard apart from the continuous loop of the gallery. In the room, as the 4Columns review put it (2016), "ambient sounds of burbling water slowly give way to a melancholy acoustic ballad". Sleep takes the A side, a title that names exactly what the beds invite. Spiracle, on the B side, is the song Hyperallergic singled out (2016), hearing an "innocent-sounding melody" carrying lyrics he found laced with violence. A spiracle is a breathing hole, the opening through which an insect or a whale takes in air, an apt word for a film spent underwater. The Vinyl Factory's own guide to the exhibition called the soundtrack dream-like, the thread that knits the film together. The images, it noted, move between the abstract and the literal, the murky and the clear. The guide also announced that the record would go on sale inside The Store X during the run, so that visitors could take the sound of the room home with them.

Single 12" pressed on clear vinyl by The Vinyl Factory in October 2018, limited to 500 copies, with Sleep on side A and Spiracle on side B.