Gabrielle Losoncy - 2022 - Judged For Buying Insulin

 

Lake Shark Harsh Noise – LAKE SHARK HN #18  129.71MB FLAC

Judged For Buying Insulin begins with a title that sounds less like the name of an artwork than a sentence removed from an unfinished report. Someone was judged. The supposed offense was buying insulin. The person performing the judgment has disappeared, leaving only the judgment and the action that provoked it. Gabi Losoncy, credited here by the more formal Gabrielle, gives us the consequence without supplying the courtroom.

That grammar marks an important change from Judgement, her 2016 recording. Judgement named an abstract process and placed the listener inside an environment where incomplete sounds encouraged uncertain conclusions. Judged For Buying Insulin is already in the past tense. The conclusion has been reached and attached to a person. We are no longer listening to judgment forming. We are hearing work made beneath the weight of having been judged.

The title is disturbingly plain because the action it describes is so ordinary. A person buys medicine. Money, need, paperwork, packaging, and a human body briefly meet at a counter or within some other commercial system. Nothing in that act should require a defense, yet the title tells us that somebody converted it into evidence about character. A practical act of keeping a body functioning became an occasion for somebody else’s opinion.

Losoncy does not respond by narrating the encounter. There is no explanatory monologue, no reconstructed conversation, and no attempt to establish who was right. Instead, she takes a plastic object and scrapes it for nearly half an hour. The social situation named by the title is transformed into friction.

This is a striking departure from the apparent passivity of many earlier recordings. On Didn’t Take Much, Losoncy waited in a hospital while other people and machines interpreted her condition. On Judgement, she moved through weather and public sound while environmental forces struck the microphone. Security Besides Love placed her among transportation systems, conversations, and technologies that continued operating around her. Here, the body is not merely exposed to a system. It acts upon an object.

The action is simple enough to describe in a sentence, but performing it continuously changes its meaning. Scraping once may be incidental. Scraping repeatedly becomes investigation. Continued further, it becomes labor. Continued past comfort, it becomes endurance. The same motion moves through several categories without ever needing to become a conventional musical phrase.

Plastic is an important material for this operation. It is everywhere and rarely granted much dignity. It carries food, medicine, information, waste, purchases, and temporary protection. It can be rigid or flexible, valuable or disposable, sterile or dirty. The specific object used here has not been publicly identified, and there is no reason to assume that it came from the insulin purchase named in the title. Its anonymity matters. Losoncy has selected one piece of the synthetic everyday and made its resistance audible.

The object does not sing independently. It requires pressure, angle, speed, repetition, and contact. Every sound is produced by a relationship between hand, implement, surface, microphone, and duration. What appears at first to be a narrow sonic field gradually reveals an unstable population of tiny events. A scrape catches. The pressure alters. A rough patch interrupts the motion. The hand returns at a slightly different angle. The object answers with another variation of the same refusal.

This is where the references to Strzemiński and Reinhardt become especially illuminating. Strzemiński’s Unism sought to remove the dramatic separation between figure and background, allowing the entire painted surface to operate as one organized field. Reinhardt’s late black paintings appear almost empty at first, but sustained looking reveals grids and minute variations within the darkness. Neither artist rewards the hurried glance. The viewer must remain long enough for apparent sameness to divide into difference.

Losoncy constructs a comparable listening situation. There is no melody standing in front of accompaniment and no principal event surrounded by background atmosphere. The scraping occupies the field. Its variations do not emerge as separate figures but as changes within one continuous material condition. The listener cannot wait for the important part because importance has been distributed across the whole surface.

The tape therefore behaves almost like an auditory monochrome. Calling it monochromatic does not mean that every second is identical. It means that Losoncy has restricted the palette severely enough for differences that would normally seem negligible to become structural. The ear adjusts. What first resembles one abrasive mass becomes ridged, granular, pulsing, interrupted, and physically specific.

Repetition also makes the body increasingly present even when no voice is heard. A machine can repeat without fatigue, but a person must continually renew the action. Muscles tighten, concentration shifts, grip changes, and discomfort accumulates. The recording may conceal the performer visually, yet endurance draws the outline of her body more clearly with every minute.

That makes the work very different from anonymous texture. Harsh sound can sometimes create the illusion of endless material detached from a human source. Losoncy’s scraping retains the scale of an action. We can imagine its production because the sound carries the evidence of contact. This is not a storm presented as sublime natural force. It is a person staying with one object.

The title prevents that activity from becoming purely formal. Without the words Judged For Buying Insulin, the recording could be approached as a study in plastic resonance, percussive abrasion, repetition, or sculptural sound. The title drags social experience into the room. Every scrape now occurs beneath a sentence about medicine, commerce, vulnerability, and somebody else’s authority to form an opinion.

At the same time, the relationship between title and sound remains unresolved. Losoncy does not tell us that the scraping illustrates anger, humiliation, resistance, or any other specific emotion. Assigning one would repeat the judgmental behavior named by the release, deciding from limited evidence what another person must have felt. The work does not translate the incident into an easily recognized emotional soundtrack. It preserves the distance between experience and interpretation.

This is one of the great strengths of her practice. Losoncy can make intensely personal work without turning the listener into a biographical detective. The title tells us enough to establish pressure, but not enough to satisfy curiosity about the people involved. The sound then redirects attention away from gossip and toward material action. Instead of asking exactly what happened, we are placed inside what she chose to do with the fact that it happened.

The use of her full first name adds another subtle formality. “Gabrielle Losoncy” could be the name printed on a medical form, identification card, receipt, prescription, bill, or official record. “Gabi” belongs more easily to friends and informal circulation. The full name does not necessarily announce a new identity, but on this particular release it sounds as though the person named in the title is entering something into evidence under her complete name.

Lake Shark Harsh Noise was an especially appropriate home for the tape. Sam McKinlay’s work as The Rita has long treated contact with specific physical objects as a source of highly concentrated noise, with texture produced through obsessive attention rather than generic distortion. Losoncy does not simply imitate that practice. She brings her own concern with private experience, reduction, and withheld explanation into a context prepared to recognize scraping itself as complete musical material.

The encounter reveals how close Losoncy’s work had always been to noise, even when it was categorized as field recording or sound art. Her earlier recordings often preserved friction between individuals and institutions, microphones and weather, speech and machinery, or private thought and public space. Judged For Buying Insulin makes the friction literal. Instead of documenting a conflict already sounding in the environment, she produces a sustained conflict between surfaces.

The act can be heard as an attempt to make pressure visible through sound. Social judgment is difficult to record because it may consist of a look, a tone, an implication, or a remembered interpretation. Scraping provides pressure with an acoustic body. Force is applied, resistance answers, and the encounter leaves a textured trace in time.

Yet the performance is not simply cathartic release. Its continuity requires control. Losoncy must maintain enough consistency for the texture to form while allowing the physical object to keep generating variation. Anger alone would probably exhaust itself quickly or break the action into dramatic gestures. This recording is more disciplined. It converts whatever stands behind the title into a procedure.

That procedure connects back to the statement accompanying I Can Be Convinced. There, Losoncy described isolating an elemental component of something otherwise operationally impossible and making that component possible. Judged For Buying Insulin can be heard as another such reduction. The original social event cannot be transferred whole. Its relationships, memories, expressions, and private meanings are unavailable. What can be made operational is a smaller component: pressure meeting resistance.

The result is an effective substitute without being a reenactment. The scraping does not reproduce buying insulin or being judged. It preserves a relation of forces. Something touches something else repeatedly. Neither surface disappears. A record is created from their continued disagreement.

The duration matters because endurance allows the action to outlive its initial symbolism. During the opening minutes, the listener may connect each abrasion directly to the title. As time passes, the sound begins developing its own interior logic. Attention moves toward rhythm, density, hand movement, and the acoustic personality of the plastic. Then the title returns unexpectedly, changing the sound again. Meaning circulates rather than remaining fixed.

This oscillation protects the work from becoming propaganda. Losoncy does not use sound to illustrate a predetermined moral lesson. She allows physical experience and language to remain partially independent, each exerting pressure upon the other. The title makes the scraping social; the scraping prevents the title from being reduced to a slogan.

The cassette’s one-sided construction extends that principle into the object. After twenty-nine minutes of sustained contact, the listener reaches a reverse side containing nothing. The empty side is not merely unused capacity. It gives the action a physical boundary. One surface has been worked; the other remains untouched.

That blank reverse also anticipates Lieutenant, where an entire side of vinyl would again be left without audio. Losoncy repeatedly refuses the assumption that available space must be filled. A carrier may have two sides, but the work does not owe both of them content. Completion is determined by the action, not by the storage capacity of the medium.

There is a satisfying relationship between the scratched or scraped sound and the cassette itself. Tape is a linear plastic medium moving through mechanical contact. Its shell, reels, leader, magnetic coating, and pressure pad depend upon friction being controlled rather than eliminated. The performance on the recording and the mechanism reproducing it belong to the same broad world of plastic surfaces being pulled, rubbed, and moved.

Playing the physical edition would therefore create several layers of contact at once. Losoncy scrapes the original object. Magnetic tape passes across a playback head. The listener handles the cassette shell and turns it over, only to encounter the silent reverse. The format does not simply contain the piece. It quietly repeats its material vocabulary.

Only 75 copies were produced, accompanied by an oversized insert and sealed in a resealable bag. This presentation places the recording somewhere between album, document, editioned artwork, and preserved piece of evidence. The bag protects the object while also making it resemble something catalogued, collected, or removed from ordinary circulation.

The digital transfer changes this experience. The RUTracker-derived FLAC preserves the thirty-minute action with lossless precision, but it cannot reproduce the blank side, cassette mechanism, oversized paper, plastic bag, or physical pause created by turning the tape over. Those elements become facts surrounding the file rather than experiences contained within it.

Nevertheless, the transfer gives the work another form of endurance. A one-sided cassette issued in 75 copies could easily become nearly inaudible within a few years, trapped in private collections and increasingly expensive secondary-market listings. An unknown person extracted its sound and placed it into a system where other strangers could keep it moving. The repeated action survived because somebody performed another repetitive action: ripping, checking, uploading, seeding, and maintaining data.

That digital route also creates an unexpected material rhyme. Losoncy’s performance reduces an experience to friction against plastic. The cassette reduces that performance to magnetic information on plastic. The FLAC reduces the cassette playback to encoded data. Each stage removes part of the previous object while preserving enough of its pattern to generate another encounter.

The blog now restores a public title and image to a file that might otherwise circulate as an abbreviation. That matters particularly here because the sound without its title would become a fundamentally different work. The recording’s texture survives independently, but its confrontation with social judgment requires the words to travel beside it.

There is another judgment waiting at the listener’s end of the chain. Someone hearing thirty minutes of scraping may decide that it is too simple, irritating, crude, or insufficiently musical. That reaction is permitted, but the title makes it impossible to feel entirely innocent. What standards are being applied? Who established them? Why is a sustained human action considered empty while familiar musical repetition is accepted without question?

Losoncy does not demand that the listener approve. She creates a situation in which approval and dismissal become audible parts of the work. We notice ourselves evaluating the action, measuring its legitimacy, and deciding how much attention it deserves. The person buying insulin was judged; now the recording is judged; behind both judgments sits a system of expectations that usually remains invisible.

Judged For Buying Insulin does not answer judgment with explanation. It answers with persistence. A hand returns to a surface, again and again, creating difference inside repetition until a disposable object becomes a field of concentrated attention. The work does not ask permission to qualify as music, testimony, sculpture, or private ritual. It applies pressure and allows the material to answer.

Anyone who owns the original cassette or oversized insert may possess more of the art-historical notes and visual information surrounding the release. Someone may also know the circumstances behind its extraordinary title. Until those fragments surface, the responsible position is not to invent the missing story. The tape gives us what Losoncy decided could be carried outward: one title, one action, one worked side, and nearly thirty minutes of a body refusing to disappear behind somebody else’s judgment.