We are glad to present the third issue of grapefruits. This
time six authors from different professional backgrounds wrote
about female* composers and sound artists and their use and
understanding of instruments: Limpe Fuchs
encounters her instruments from eye to eye. Tones and sounds
want to be lured out and listened to with care. Playing an
instrument is like an encounter to her, in each of her ever
changing performances a new experience.
Black Acid aka Nina Pixel
is not interested in virtous playing a specific
instrument. In contrast to the classic notion of instrumental
musicians she feels attracted by instruments either destroyed or
instruments she cannot properly play. As a sound artist she
turns things and phenomens she likes acoustically into
instruments by the means of her music production process.
Matana Roberts
turns music itself into an instrument to tell history
and make it tangible. Anna Schimkat
builds her own instruments
and uses her field recordings, compositions, installations and
performances as instruments for sharpening conscious
perception. For Laurie Spiegel
programming and composing belong
to one process. By developing her own software, she can
transform computers into intelligent instruments, making it
possible to focus on the intuitive, emotional and almost
limitless creation of sounds. Tina Tonagel’s
work ranges from sound installations, visual arts and
performance pieces with self-built instruments. Enjoy reading!
Instruments on Instruments
or How to Train Your Third Leg
Musical instruments are not just tools, they are material and
social constructions at the same time. As we interact with
instruments, we create meaning for and through them and in
return musical instruments as cultural objects form and
transform our understanding of musicianship and music itself.
[…]
Over her forty-year career Limpe Fuchs has continued
experimenting with improvisational sound using her self-invented
instruments such as pendulumstring, knirscher, lithophone, sheet
metal and pieces of wood. For her, playing an instrument is like
an encounter, in each of her ever changing performances a new
experience. Tones and sounds want to be lured out and listened
to with care. They can always tell something different.
[…] artist website
Photo: Nina Pixel at A4 – Space For Contemporary Culture by Branislav Grebčí.
Black Acid aka Nina Pixel is a slovakian-polish producer, DJ and
sound artist living in Berlin since a few years. The first time
I experienced her music was during the Sonic Acts Festival 2019
in Amsterdam, where she captivated the audience by melting a
dark, grounded set of loops and recordings by using live
electronics as well as instruments she played live on stage. […] artist website
Matana Roberts turns music itself into an instrument to tell
history and make it tangible. Not in the sense of storytelling,
but in its connectedness with the topicality of American
society. In compiling and collaging musical and textual sources,
she makes audible connections that reveal historical lines and
create new statements from her own perspective. […] artist website
Anna Schimkat works as a fine artist, entering the field of
sound art with her installations and performances. She composes
spaces which sharpen perception and thereby enforce the
perceiver’s action. Her sound materials are self-built
instruments and field-recordings of her main instrument: The
world surrounding us. Her latest work is the installation and
performance Die Glocken von Mutzschen and PAX,
its visual counterpart. […] artist website
Laurie Spiegel, a pioneer of computer music, is certainly a
familiar name to many of us. In fact, after more than thirty
years, her works have recently experienced a kind of revival. In
addition to a re-release of her more famous debut album
The Expanding Universe in 2018, Unseen Worlds Records
released her second album Unseen Worlds for
the very first time on vinyl last year. Spiegel’s unique melodic
sounds created with mathematic algorithms and her ideas of
electronic music as a sort of folk music were far ahead of their
time and are still inspiring today.
[…] artist website
Tina Tonagel is a sound and media artist living in Cologne. Her
work ranges from sound installations, visual arts and
performances pieces with self-built instruments. She managed to
make a name for herself while constantly working in
collaboration with different artists and empowering others to be
independent sound creators through her workshops.
[…] artist website
