In stock
LP
Anton BRUHIN
“Rotomotor / InOut”
In the mid-1970s Anton Bruhin was surely at the peak of his tape manipulation works. Always using poor techniques and equipment he sculpted everyday-life sonic objects turning them into very accomplished and yet totally experimental music artifacts. The works presented here surely are among the most accomplished results of his expanded creativity.
"InOut", a masterpiece for tuning whistle, mouthharps, flutes, toy and party gag instruments, percussion, bells, electric razor, model ship engine with propeller, birdcall whistles, CH-Phon, feedback speaker-microphone, siren, double shawm, falling down spoon, jew's harp (only two short notes), tearing scotch tape from the spool, ocarina, hair dryer and other noise makers plus occasionally radio tuner was recorded in Zurich between May 17th and May 22nd, 1981, on a Sanyo M7300L stereo radio cassette recorder with both integrated and external microphone. The recorder is in the recording standby position, both RECORD and PAUSE buttons are pushed. Then Bruhin sings or plays a tone into the microphone. During this tone he releases the PAUSE button by pushing it. Subsequently he presses the PAUSE button again within a fraction of a second. Now the first short note is recorded. In "InOut" thousands of very short notes were added this way, like a patchwork, like an acoustic quilt with geometric irregularities and varied patterns.
"Rotomotor", subtitled "ein motorische Idiotikon", is a 28 minutes long reading representing one of Bruhin's major works. Written in Zurich between 1976 and 1977, then recorded in August 1978 at Etienne Conod's Sunrise Studio. "Rotomotor" is a poetic Idiotikon of the swiss-german dialect where, instead of the straight alphabetical order, the words are organized 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. As always in Anton Buhin poetics, a very simple concept perfectly accomplished.
Anton Bruhin in the 1960s began organizing happenings and performances, creating sound works, designing and typesetting his own books (which he self-published with Hannes R. Bossert through April-Verlag), drawing and writing poetry. Anton Bruhin was a member of the first class to study at the F+F School with Serge Stauffer, famous art teacher and specialist in Marcel Duchamp, where he came into contact with concrete poetry, Fluxus and experimental music.
22,50€
Out of stock
LP
Anton BRUHIN
“Speech Poems / Fruity Music”
Black Truffle is delighted to offer up a rare serving of unheard works by legendary Swiss artist Anton Bruhin. Active as a visual artist, poet, and musician since the 1960s, Bruhin has created important work in forms as varied as concrete poetry and landscape painting, imbuing everything he does with wit, humility, and absurdist humour. A recognised master of the jew’s harp (or Trümpi, as this ancient folk instrument is known in Swiss German), Bruhin’s sound work also encompasses tape collage, sound poetry, and manipulated bird song.
On Speech Poems/Fruity Music we are treated to 26 short pieces made between 2006 and 2008 using the audio software Fruity Loops. These pieces carry on Bruhin’s long-running project of exploring the creative use and misuse of cheap, accessible technologies. In many of his analogue works, Bruhin explored the possibilities of simple cassette equipment. He invented DIY approaches to layering sounds by using multiple tape machines, experimented with distortion and tape speed, or, in his classic Inout (1981) created a maniacally single-minded audio monument to the pause button. Like the computer pixel drawings the artist produced around the same time as these recordings, Speech Poems/Fruity Music extends this approach to consumer software, presenting two parallel sequences of works that make use of Fruity Loops’ inbuilt synthetic instruments and its speech synthesis function. The instrumental works play like a twisted take on the aesthetics of 1980s video game soundtracks, using synthetic accordion and harpsichord sounds to realise jaunty little ditties that exploit their machine-realisation by making use of improbable pitch-bends and humanly impossible tempos and articulations.
Between these samples of Fruity Music, we are treated to the Speech Poems, a series of recitations by a lone computer-generated voice. Many of them are in fact songs, as the synthetic voice crudely and hilariously changes pitch as it moves through its fragmented syllables and odes to cream in coffee. Carrying on Bruhin’s interest in the creative misuse of technology, many of the Speech Poems attempt to force Fruity Loops’ voice synthesis, designed only to speak English, to speak German. By entering phonetic text into the program, Bruhin gets it to produce a passable German alphabet and a series of approximations to a proper pronunciation of his name.
Hilarious while strangely austere, entertaining but bizarre, Speech Poems/Fruity Music is classic Anton Bruhin, arriving in a beautiful mosaic cover by the artist, with the text of the ‘abc für anglophone’ on the back cover.
20,00€
Out of stock
LP
Anton BRUHIN
“Deux pipes”
“In the past few years alga marghen successfully released on CD some of Anton Bruhin more experimental works. “InOut”, “Rotomotor” and the CD version of his first LP masterpiece from 1969 “Vom goldabfischer”, made many of you become familiar with the eccentric creations of this obscure Swiss artist. But for this new release alga marghen decided to concentrate on Anton Bruhin favorite instrument, the jews harp. Included in this LP record are six breathtaking jews harp pieces of pure genius. On Side 1 “Apocalypt Rb- with sampling loop” and “Chor H+ with sampling loop and solo reverb pot”, recorded in January 2000 while testing some modified jews harp self-made instruments created by Zoltan Szilagyi. This virtuoso performance is improvised over to a loop-continuum sampled through a Casio child synth. On Side 2 the all-time-classic titled “Maultrommel und Sprache” (i.e. Jews Harp and Speaking) where Bruhin is scientifically investigating the use of jews harp in rendering human voice. Recorded in 1994 this piece, divided in five short paragraphs, move from the very basic structure of language (vocals, diptongues, triptongues) and constructs a perfectly accomplished sonic statement. Also on Side 2 are three pieces from 1995 for Electric-Trumpi-2, the only existing second generation electric jews harp, constructed specially by Szilagyi for Anton Bruhin. “Towards the G-Spot”, “ET2 with fly and cough” and “ET2 extreme filling” grandly complete the collection of limousine musics selected for this record. Gatefold sleeve with large 8 page booklet reproducing four mind-blowing drawings released between 1969 and 2006 that well proof Anton Bruhin ultra-modernistic talent of the most refined nature. Also included in the booklet is the complete score of “Maultrommel und Sprache”. Edition limited to 330 copies.” label info
23,00€
In stock
CD
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.
15,00€
Out of stock
CD
Anton BRUHIN
“Vom Goldabfischer”
“The new compact disc by Anton Bruhin issued by Alga Marghen is titled Vom Goldabfisher and presents for the first time on cd the classic experimental folk recordings with the same title first issued on LP in 1969.”
15,00€