Usually a record release celebrates the culmination of a recording project. Like a book launch, it marks the moment where a work leaves the artist's hands and encounters an audience. Record Release is a project that reverses that process and includes the act of releasing as part of the recording process itself. 

Record Release involves the manipulation of the raw material used to manufacture vinyl records. These lentil-sized small pellets of petroleum product come in this form because they are easily transportable before they get melted and stamped with grooves of sound. 

This is a sound project which focuses on one of the standard physical support materials of sound and utilizes these tiny units of potential sound in a gestural manner to produce not only audio material but also images, video content and a slew of data related to the process of dissemination involved. The other material used is a series of grooveless 7-inch opaque white vinyl records. It is a record in name only. It contains no recordings.

Both of these materials are mute and inert. One is minuscule. The other looks like a record but is unplayable. Both contain only potential.

For Kunstradio, I wanted to focus on how the pellets and vinyl records would interact as objects with a set of drums. The drum kit consisted of a bass drum, three toms, a snare and three cymbals. I have never played drums, but if I was to consider one of the primary inclination in my sound practice in musical terms I would say that I often gravitate to the percussive properties of sounds. In other words, I think percussively, I think in terms of punctuated events, of accidents and the spaces in between. I suppose I am a drummer by default. 

So, in short, I went into the studios of the ORF on July 16-17, 2015, and improvised with this instrumentation: the drum kit, the vinyl pellets and grooveless records, plus some balloons and a pair of surface resonating speakers. With this setup, the act of releasing activated the space and the resonances of the objects. The recordings were subsequently transformed heavily, in some cases to push further the accidents and the suggestion of chaos, and in others only very lightly edited to highlight the acoustics produced by the gestures as well as those of the studio itself. Is this music? Is it sound art? No, it's simply a record releasing. 

RECORD RELEASE 7 inch:

this one is percussive
this one features the balloons but it's heavily treated
this one also uses a balloons full of vinyl pellets, recording done on the 2nd day, there's a bit of layering, but otherwise no effects
this one features a drone fed through the surface resonating speakers making the surface of drums vibrate and the vinyl pellets that are on them dance around
this one is a heavily treated version (except for the very beginning) of manipulating the vinyl pellets in sheets of metal
this one is a montage of several sections of the recordings I liked
this one is just a quick vignette

Fotos from production at Kunstradio
http://www.christofmigone.com/html/projects_gallery/RecordRelease7inch_Kunstradio.html

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