Gabi Losoncy - 2023 - Lieutenant LP

 

Self-released – none  87.19MB FLAC

Lieutenant occupies only one side of a vinyl record, but it does not feel like half an album. The unused reverse side becomes part of its architecture, a physical territory of withheld information. After the recorded side finishes, there is still another complete side of the object sitting beneath the needle, present but unavailable. That seems entirely appropriate for Gabi Losoncy, an artist whose work repeatedly brings us close to another person while preserving the final, uncrossable distance between one consciousness and another.

The piece begins with a request for extraordinary openness. Losoncy wants another person to describe not merely what they think about her, but what they think about everything, including the thoughts that normally remain unspoken. It sounds like ordinary relationship language until one considers the size of the request. She is asking for access to the invisible interior accumulation behind another person’s face: stray judgments, buried associations, private fears, undeclared tenderness, and the thoughts that disappear before language can catch them. Most music asks to be heard. Lieutenant begins by asking whether another human being can ever be completely known.

The sounds that follow do not provide an orderly answer. The recording becomes a close, obscured terrain of rumbling, friction, shifting surfaces, bodily movement, fabric, contact, and pressure. At times it resembles a recorder carried inside a pocket or purse; elsewhere it suggests a microphone pressed so near to an activity that the event itself becomes impossible to identify. Conventional field recording often gives us a place and allows environmental sound to describe it. Losoncy reverses that relationship. We receive abundant physical evidence but remain uncertain about where we are, what is happening, and how we are supposed to interpret it. The microphone has reached the scene, but comprehension has not.

That distinction is central to the album. Intimacy is not the same as understanding. A recording device can come within inches of a body, a room, or an encounter and still fail to tell us what anyone involved is feeling. Lieutenant continually places the listener in this peculiar position. We are close enough to feel intrusive, yet too far away to know what we have intruded upon. The low fidelity does not merely conceal information; it demonstrates how much information remains concealed even when someone appears to reveal everything.

Losoncy’s restraint is unusually forceful. She does not arrange these sounds into a dramatic collage, polish them into ambient atmosphere, or underline significant moments with recognizable musical signals. Instead, she permits the material to retain its stubborn opacity. The scraping does not become percussion simply because we would find percussion easier to understand. The rumbling does not become a drone merely because “drone” would provide a useful shelf for the record. These sounds remain attached to causes we cannot see. The resulting music sits somewhere between field recording, sound diary, private performance, accidental documentation, and emotional evidence submitted without explanatory testimony.

The title adds another quiet complication. A lieutenant occupies a secondary position, carrying authority while remaining subject to an authority above. The word suggests someone entrusted with a command that did not originate entirely within them. On this record, Losoncy is simultaneously director, participant, recorder, and person awaiting a response. She controls what we hear, yet the work is organized around something she cannot control: what another person thinks and whether that person will disclose it. The title may therefore describe an emotional rank. She possesses authority over the record but not over the consciousness she wants to enter.

Near the end, she asks whether the other person likes it. The question could refer to an object, an action, the recording, the shared encounter, or Losoncy herself. Its ambiguity concentrates the entire record into a few words. Asking “Do you like it?” is rarely just a request for consumer information. Beneath it can hide a thicket of other questions: Are you comfortable? Do you understand what I am doing? Do you approve of me? Are we experiencing the same thing? Have I misread you? Are you still here? The recording cannot guarantee an honest answer, but the question creates a small bridge between two private worlds.

Lieutenant was initially circulated as a possible final release, which gives its one-sided construction the feeling of an artist stopping in the middle of a sentence and refusing to explain whether the silence is temporary or permanent. It is not a grand farewell. There is no retrospective sweep, no final statement of principles, and no attempt to make the work accessible to people arriving late. Instead, Losoncy leaves behind one more concentrated specimen of her peculiar art: ordinary physical existence transformed not through decoration, but through selection, framing, duration, and attention.

This is also why the vinyl edition matters. Lieutenant does not behave like interchangeable streaming material. Its incompleteness has weight. The listener turns over a record that has nothing further to disclose, encountering the limitation physically rather than merely watching a progress bar reach its end. The object becomes an unanswered letter, one side bearing a message and the other carrying only the fact that no additional message was supplied. A digital copy preserves the sound, but the record preserves the gesture.

Gabi Losoncy’s music can seem almost aggressively uneventful until one recognizes the scale at which its events occur. A shift in pressure, an indistinct movement, or a plainly spoken question can become enormous because she removes the conventional machinery that normally tells listeners what deserves attention. Lieutenant offers no hierarchy between confession and background noise. Both are traces of a life passing through matter. Both reveal something, and neither reveals enough.

Anyone who knows Losoncy’s Philadelphia years, encountered Good Area, or received one of these self-released records directly may possess another fragment of the picture. Yet the missing pieces should not be mistaken for a failure of the work. Lieutenant is about the fragments through which people attempt to know one another. It places those fragments on vinyl and lets their incompleteness remain audible.