Sound Installations

Recordings of endless border walls, vast piles of garbage, and organs in the human body.

This spring, Vienna’s experimental label for “new punk computer music,” Editions Mego, releases an anxiety-inducing record by Australian-born, Berlin-based sound artist Jasmine Guffond.

With contributions from Okkyung Lee, Alan Licht, Aakash Mittal, and more.

The founder of gelbe MUSIK, the renowned record store and gallery space, speaks about its history.

The artist and composer stages her latest entanglement of bodies, spaces, and sounds at the Biennale de Montréal this October.

Everywhere you look in the first room, there are little directives, tucked into the art, to text various numbers for answers. I did as bidden, but because I was listening to Fiona Apple’s “I Know” on repeat too loudly over my headphones, I couldn’t hear the answers, which emanated God-like from the walls, and so I only have this one-sided record for you, dear reader.

“Liberty’s show manages to be about prison and not about prison at the same time: her audience writes about how the music lets them forget they’re incarcerated for a moment, and she calls that effect ‘time travel.’”

To find latent hymns in an increasingly dilapidated modernist Italian office building or situate an original sound composition within so highly reverent a structure as a James Turrell Skyspace requires a combination of confidence and humility found only in play. 

This article is only available in print.

For over 20 years Christian Marclay has been creating works that explore the intersection of the aural and the visual, reflecting on the nature of how sound and image are related.

Nearly six years ago, after a long day of wandering Chelsea in a daze, I walked into 303 Gallery looking for a good painting show and instead had my first Aitken encounter. 

Alan Uglow doesn’t neglect a single source of inspiration—from the noise of the street to the beauty of Italian luxury cars—his is a rigorous formal reflection with a subjectivity full of charm and tenderness. Alan’s paintings are beyond reductive commentary and that’s why, with him, it’s always best to stay alert.

Alan Scarritt discusses his mandala-esque plaster spirals, and the sound of a harmonica in a warm room, with fellow artist Keith Sonnier.