Broken Pieces
Limited Edition 7″ Plaster Disc. MOOZAK (2021).
A genealogy of broken records infinitely entangles the immaculate disc. Hundreds of records have already broken for one crisp tune—accidentally smashed in the first production attempts, or deliberately destroyed out of pain and disappointment. Often enough, however, they have broken at the most opportune moment.
Ideally, these shattered pieces contain the echoes of renewing structures. From within their wreckage whispers the brief insight that the world’s true nature might actually lie in its falling to pieces. For when movements or processes have reached a cusp, only then will they fulfil themselves in decomposition. They initiate something new.
Perhaps it’s still possible to play the composition of breaking objects from these grooves. In fact, there is a soundtrack carved into the plaster disc. But as this fragile record finds its way to you—the collector—via mail, you will most likely be holding its pieces in your hand. At this moment, a poetic puff of silence blows towards you. Sounds of upheaval and breaking-away, outbursts and break-ups now resonate in your imagination; the crashing, smashing and bursting of material that goes along with the documentation of these turning points. Have you forgotten that this essential motif is only realized in the cracking of the disc?
(Auto-)destructive gestures are staged as revolutions—within the arts of Western modernisms as well as its political movements. In contrast to the delicate structure of the record player needle—made of diamonds or sapphire; how it feels out the sound from the rotating disc—and the brute rupture caused by a destructive gesture, this medium is embedded in an ecstasy of bodies and the machine. Whilst breath and beat are synchronized at 140 bpm, an intentional break in the rhythm is a willful syncopation. As fragments caused by accident, these broken pieces are not the kind of destruction that articulates itself as a ritualized gesture. They rather intend a multiplication of possibilities by altering the (sounding) patterns—even if this means silence.
Broken only to be a whole, these pieces stimulate the growth of new structures, instead of simply smashing the old ones. For it could be that the structure itself is also only a phantasm of your imagination.
Art & Music by Karl Salzmann – www.karlsalzmann.com
Concept by Karl Salzmann & C. Hausch
Photographs by Markus Gradwohl – www.noiseredux.net
Text by Lona Gaikis – lonagaikis.info
Artwork by C. Hausch – hausch.io