Anton BRUHIN
“Rotomotor”

The new compact disc by Anton Bruhin issued by Alga Marghen is titled Rotomotor and covers two different areas of the artist’s research. The first one is represented by a group of works including the short and mysterious environmental recording ’Orax’ as well as ’Lange Tone’, ’Versuchpilz 6’ and ’Paul is 35’, three excerpts from the epic ’MC-10 zyklus’ created between 1976 and 1977 recording various layers of sound sources on two cassette recorders with loudspeakers. The complete zyklus consists of 12 different episodes (each one ten minutes long) which investigate the multi-layer ping-pong recording technique; the spatial illusion of the monoaural replay which moves away from the listener’s ears into the depth of space. Far away sounds coming from a cosmic dimension or from an abyssal space, moving fore and back. The loss of sound quality considered as stoned space improvement. ’r o t o m o t o r: ein motorische Idiotikon’, the title track, is a 28 minutes long reading, one of Bruhin’s major works. Rotomotor is a poetic Idiotikon of the swiss-german dialect where, instead of the straight alphabetical order, the words are organised according to the similarities of their letters (each word differ from the previous one by just one letter). For this reading a delay equipment which repeated the signal after 0.6 seconds was used and each word is superimposed to the echo of the preceding one. On one hand this echo generates the rhythm of the performance, on the other it supports the acoustic metamorphosis of the words. Again, a very simple concept perfectly accomplished. What results from the whole program is maybe difficult to describe, maybe more easily perceivable in a state of alternate consciousness. But surely a quite unique sense of acoustics approach; so no surprise to see him mentioned in the mythical Nurse With Wound reference list. Chance meeting in an Alpine chalet of a roto-Bruhin and an Akre.