technology 2 Publications in Random Order

BORSHCH is a magazine for electronic music on and beyond the dancefloor. Founded in Berlin in 2017, it’s a space to provoke open dialogues and challenge established ideas about making, listening, and dancing to music. Through physical and digital formats, BORSHCH discusses the artistic, social, and political impact of electronic music on contemporary culture in and outside the club settings. The print edition of the magazine is published biannually.

In BORSHCH #5, we enter sweaty basements and concrete cathedrals and explore the culture of darkness born out of protest. In unsettling environments, we embrace the shadows and challenge our senses with obscure electronic music. When do you feel comfortable with your discomfort? What happens when the lights go off, and the only source of illumination you’re left with is blurry haze or an abrupt stroboscopic pulse? Conversation with Deena Abdelwahed, Lucrecia Dalt, and Alessandro Adriani question the ambiguity of ‘dark’ sound and psychological impact of unpolished music. Artist portraits of Animistic Beliefs, Rrose, Klein, Ziúr deconstruct the dark areas where sins, injustice, and disquiet are as human and real as pleasures and joy. This issue of Borshch considers entering the dark as an act of coming home, to the cave where the primary source of life is hidden.

TAMBOURINE is an online platform established for the promotion and distribution of the independent magazine scene. Its aim is to decipher the role of printed matter in contemporary culture, as well as provide its readers with the latest magazine releases, connecting the digital community with the highest quality printed matter goods.

Entitled “Mixtape”, this catalogue brings together works by Dominique Hurth from 2008 to 2020. It comprises one text booklet with contributions by Daniela Cascella, Sonja Lau and the artist herself; one image booklet with 136 images from installation shots of Hurth’s work and one audio-tape (45-min each side) with recordings, music and sound material inherent to the research behind the works. The chosen format reflects on her interest in object-biography, technology and its history.

“We listened to historical recordings and futurist sounds, to tracks taking in everything from minimal wave and Detroit techno to hip-hop and chansons. We listened to the voices of the first speaking dolls that sounded like little monsters, to the voices of Sarah Bernhardt and Serge Gainsbourg as he burned a 500 Franc note on French TV. To Clarice Lispector as she lit a cigarette while being asked why she continued to write. We listened to music created in laboratories, music that was sent into outer space. We listened to lyrics and then languages and voices w couldn’t understand. Machine-generated sounds. Sounds created on celluloid. James Joyce reciting four pages of Finnegans Wake to Charles Ogden in the late 1920s. We listened to advertisements for vocoders and to music with vocoders as the primary transmitter of voice and the main musical instrument. We listened to France Gall singing — or rather, screaming — into the microphone at the Eurovisio Song Contest at the age of nineteen about being a doll made of wax and a doll made of sound. To a litany of okays sung by The Destroyer in a song by the Residents. To the breathing of Pauline Oliveros’s accordion. To the Holy Ghost in the Machine. To Minnie Riperton’s voice in the background, to atonal music, and to computer-generated hand claps. Electronic communication with the dead. Jazz.
A countdown to zero. We listened to beats.

The several hours of sound that we listened to eventually became two side of forty-five minutes each — Side A and Side B. Condensed and edited in this way, this mixtape actually conceals and contains several other mixtapes, recalling all the other tracks that burst out of the edges of the magnetic band.” (”Mixtape(s)”, D. Hurth, 2020)