Security Besides Love begins inside a machine designed to carry strangers together. A public bus or similar vehicle moves through the city while its passengers briefly occupy one shared acoustic container. Nobody selected the other people present, yet their bodies, voices, problems, telephone calls, smells, silences, and destinations are temporarily joined. Gabi Losoncy records this ordinary arrangement until it begins to resemble a complete model of society: people being transported beside lives they cannot fully know.
On “Part One,” another passenger talks at length while the vehicle contributes its own changing voice. The engine rises and settles, hardware trembles, doors and road surfaces alter the surrounding pressure, and the whole recording moves between human disclosure and mechanical accompaniment. The speaker’s words attract attention because they carry fragments of difficulty, but the transportation system never politely lowers itself beneath the conversation. Machinery and testimony coexist at the same level. A personal crisis may be unfolding, yet the bus must continue along its route.
That indifference is not necessarily cruel. Public transportation is one of the forms of security existing outside love. A bus does not need to know or love its passengers before carrying them. Roads, schedules, fares, drivers, maintenance workers, traffic lights, and municipal systems create a practical network through which people can move when affection alone cannot move them. Love may comfort a person, but it cannot always provide transportation, housing, medicine, income, food, or protection. The title quietly opens that difficult territory without reducing it to a slogan.
“Security besides love” could mean the things people need in addition to emotional connection, but it could also describe the wish to find something more dependable than love. Love changes. People leave, misunderstand, become exhausted, or remain unable to supply what another person needs. Systems can fail too, but they promise a different kind of continuity. The bus arrives according to a timetable rather than devotion. The recorder stores sound without needing to understand it. The record can remain after the relationship, encounter, or emotional state that produced it has changed.
Losoncy does not stage the public conversation as a dramatic performance. We enter partway through another person’s life and leave before its circumstances can be resolved. This creates the uncomfortable intimacy of overhearing. The speaker is near enough for private trouble to become audible, yet still remains a stranger. We may understand individual statements, but we cannot know what occurred before the recording, what has been omitted, or how the story would sound from another position.
The record therefore makes listening feel ethically unstable. Paying attention can be an act of care, but it can also become consumption. Another person’s distress may fascinate us precisely because we are not responsible for solving it. Losoncy does not provide an easy moral position outside the event. She records from within the same moving vehicle, subject to the same noise, route, and social closeness. She is not hovering invisibly above the scene. Her presence is embedded in the document even when her voice is absent.
The machinery prevents the passenger’s speech from becoming a polished confession. Words are interrupted by vibration, distance, movement, and changes in the vehicle’s tone. The bus continually reminds us that experience is being transmitted through matter. A statement must travel from a mouth, through an unstable public interior, into a small microphone, onto a recording medium, through a vinyl pressing, and eventually into another listener’s room. Meaning survives, but never without scratches from the journey.
This is where Losoncy’s apparent objectivity becomes complicated. A recorder can capture an event without speaking, but silence does not make it neutral. Someone chose when to activate the device, where to hold it, how long to continue, and which event deserved preservation. By leaving the first side relatively unshaped, Losoncy does not eliminate authorship. She relocates it into attention. Her composition is the sustained decision to remain with this situation while the outside world would normally classify it as background.
The first side looks outward, but “Part Two” reverses the direction. Losoncy becomes the principal speaker and begins thinking aloud about art, creation, and her relationship to what she makes. The shift is startling because the person who previously appeared to be an observing consciousness now becomes the recorded subject. The microphone turns around. Having allowed us to listen to another person struggling to express a life in public, Losoncy exposes her own effort to describe the private logic of her work.
Her monologue does not resemble a prepared artist statement polished into institutional language. Ideas seem to form as she speaks, branching, doubling back, testing themselves, and approaching meanings that may not have existed clearly before their articulation. Hesitation and association are not defects surrounding the argument. They are the sound of the argument being made. Losoncy records thinking as an activity rather than presenting thought as a finished product.
A repeated digital interruption or skipping sound runs beneath the voice, suggesting a malfunctioning disc, frozen computer, or short fragment caught in recurrence. It gives the monologue an accidental musical floor. Losoncy’s speech keeps moving while the machine remains trapped, producing a strange opposition between human thought and digital repetition. The mind revises itself from second to second; the machine returns to the same broken instant.
That broken repetition might ordinarily be corrected before release. Losoncy instead permits it to become part of the situation. The error does not merely accompany her discussion of art. It demonstrates an artistic principle. Something unintended enters the recording, and rather than being removed as irrelevant, it reveals the conditions under which the thinking occurred. The malfunction becomes evidence of the room, the technology, and the particular moment in which these thoughts were spoken.
The second side is vulnerable in a different way from the first. The public passenger may disclose personal circumstances without controlling the future meaning of the recording. Losoncy deliberately places her own artistic thought on display, but control remains incomplete here too. Speaking honestly does not ensure being understood. In fact, the more deeply someone tries to explain an internal system, the more visible its contradictions may become. The voice opens room after room without guaranteeing that every room connects neatly to the next.
Recital’s original description suggests a thin membrane separating Losoncy’s daily life from her artwork. This record repeatedly touches that membrane from both directions. “Part One” takes lived public experience and carries it into an art object. “Part Two” places artistic reflection back inside an ordinary technological environment. Neither side allows life and art to remain cleanly separated. The bus ride becomes composition, while the statement about composition retains the looseness and interruptions of daily life.
This explains why the two sides belong together. The first asks what happens when Losoncy frames another person’s external speech. The second asks what happens when she frames her own internal speech. One records a stranger trying to communicate circumstances; the other records the artist trying to communicate method. Both reveal that language is less secure than it appears. People speak because they want to cross the distance between themselves and others, but words arrive mixed with machinery, assumption, memory, and noise.
The title becomes more powerful when heard between these two forms of exposure. Love might mean care for the stranger, care for the self, or faith that expression can connect one person to another. Security is something else. Security requires structures capable of holding a life even when emotional understanding is incomplete. Perhaps Losoncy’s artistic practice serves as one such structure. Recording, naming, pressing, and circulating experience gives it a durable outer form without pretending to solve what occurred inside it.
Art cannot provide every kind of safety, but it can construct a container. A difficult conversation that would otherwise vanish at the end of a bus ride becomes one side of a record. A wandering private monologue becomes the other. The LP holds both without forcing either into a conclusion. This may be the particular security Losoncy’s work offers: not protection from uncertainty, but a place where uncertainty can remain intact without disappearing.
The cover looks like a network repeatedly drawn and partially erased. Dark loops, faint circles, crossings, smears, and small enclosures accumulate without resolving into a single stable picture. It could resemble tangled infrastructure, nervous pathways, transit routes, fencing, or countless attempts to circle something that refuses to stay still. The image does not illustrate the recordings, but it shares their structure. Human meaning appears inside overlapping systems, never completely isolated from everything crossing through it.
Even the included bumper sticker matters. A bumper sticker carries private language into public traffic, where strangers glimpse it without context while moving past. That is essentially the method of the first side compressed into an object. A message leaves one person’s private world, attaches itself to transportation, and becomes available to unknown observers who may interpret it correctly, incorrectly, or not at all. Losoncy’s album does the same thing on a slower scale.
Security Besides Love also occupies an important place in her development because it makes her thought audible alongside her field-recording practice. Earlier works can leave the listener almost entirely outside her explanatory system. Here she does not solve the mystery, but she allows us to hear the machinery of interpretation operating within her. The result is not a key unlocking all the other recordings. It is another recording, equally exposed to uncertainty.
This RUTracker transfer extends the album’s network of unsecured communication. One of three hundred physical copies, or another digital source derived from one, passed through an unknown listener’s equipment and entered a Russian file-sharing community. From there it reached this archive as a 161.73 MB FLAC collection. The transfer preserves the two-part structure while leaving its own route largely undocumented. We possess the sound without knowing every custodian who carried it.
That anonymous transmission is not separate from the meaning of the album. The recording begins with strangers sharing transportation, then becomes strangers sharing files. In each system, people briefly depend upon one another without love being required. The bus driver does not need to know the passengers. The torrent seeder does not need to know the downloader. Both participate in structures that move something valuable from one place to another.
Such systems are fragile, but their impersonality can contain a peculiar generosity. Someone preserved this obscure record because they believed another unknown person might eventually need or value it. No personal relationship was necessary. The act was built from attention, technical effort, and trust in a future listener. That is security besides love in another form: strangers maintaining routes through which music can continue traveling.
The album never argues that love is unnecessary. Its title implies the opposite. Love is already present as a fundamental need, but it cannot bear the entire weight of existence. People also require transportation, technology, shelter, reliable objects, social structures, private practices, and ways of preserving what would otherwise vanish. Losoncy places two vulnerable forms of speech inside a durable record and lets that contradiction remain visible.
Anyone who recognizes the public-transit route, remembers the original Recital edition, owns the bumper sticker, or knows more about the circumstances of Losoncy’s monologue may hold another section of its map. Yet the album does not depend upon solving those details. Its deepest subject is the movement between inner and outer worlds, and the uncertain structures that permit something to cross between them.
Security Besides Love listens for those structures while they are already working: a vehicle carrying bodies, a microphone carrying voices, a monologue carrying thought, a record carrying time, and strangers carrying the record onward. Love may be the reason we want another person’s experience to survive. Security is everything we build to help it make the trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.