CD comes with a 90-page catalogue released on occasion of the exhibition Sound-shifting by Möslang/Guhl at the Chiesa San Stae as part of the Swiss contribution to the 49th Venice Biennal 2001. During the preparations for their installation on the occasion of the 49th Venice Biennal in the Church San Stae in Venice, the Swiss artists Norbert Möslang and Andy Guhl, also known as the band Voicecrack, the artists did a series of video takes. This painterly series constitutes the main bulk of this artist's book, which is interspersed with visual diagrams of the sound in the Venetian Channel. For their work they lowered a hydrophon at the nearby vaporetto-stop into the Channel, half over, half under the surface of the floating water. The function of this instrument consisted in registering the sounds of the ups and downs in the "Canale Grande", the medieval city's main highway, as impulses of urban life and to transmit them into the Baroque Church of San Stae, which therefore became an immense audio space.
Likewise, the CD is filled with nearly an hour’s worth of skittering, reverberated drones and occasional noise outbursts captured by an underwater microphone at the same location.
What it all amounts to is a very thorough site-specific audio-visual document that doubles as a two-part treat for lovers of grainy minimalism. In fact, in a way, the photos look more like elegant, abstract paintings than anything that came from a camera. The book comes complete with the aforementioned CD, plus an additional 24-page booklet of notes and photos all housed in a hardcover with a glossy finish that looks kind of like some sort of weird 1970s textbook.
Voice Crack was a Swiss noise duo consisting of musicians Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang. They formed in 1972 as a free jazz outfit, but abandoned that format in the early ’80s to experiment with what they called “cracked everyday electronics,” which consisted of small, cracked open appliances rigged up with amps. This set-up produced sounds that could turn on a dime from a sparse clatter to an all-out noise tsunami.
