I Can Be Convinced contains a single thirty-one-minute piece, but its title already introduces two people. Someone can only be convinced by something outside their present position: another person, an experience, an argument, a sound, or a newly discovered part of themselves. Gabi Losoncy does not say that she has been convinced, nor does she promise that convincing will be easy. She identifies a capacity. The door is not open, exactly, but it is no longer locked.
That small grammatical distinction carries enormous weight. “I am convinced” would announce a conclusion. “Convince me” would issue a challenge. “I can be convinced” occupies the uncertain territory between resistance and willingness. It preserves autonomy while admitting that autonomy is not the same as permanent isolation. A mind may change without being defeated. An artist can remain herself while allowing another force to alter what being herself means.
The handwritten statement on the cover provides an unusually direct account of the process behind Losoncy’s work. She writes that what she wants is often operationally impossible. Rather than abandoning the desire completely, she isolates its most elemental component, the smallest part capable of producing joy or pleasure, and makes that part possible instead. The artwork is therefore not necessarily the original desired object. It may be a substitute constructed from whatever essential particle can survive contact with reality.
“Substitute” can sound inferior, like a false version accepted only because the real thing was unavailable. Losoncy gives the word another meaning. A substitute can be an ingenious survival mechanism. It identifies what was truly necessary inside an impossible wish and builds a workable structure around it. The result does not reproduce the whole fantasy, relationship, environment, or emotional condition. It keeps one functioning organ alive.
This offers a revealing way to hear her recordings. Their restraint is not simply minimalism, and their apparent incompleteness is not necessarily deprivation. Losoncy may be removing everything except the component that generated the original attraction. A conversation does not require its complete history if a single exchange carries the necessary pressure. A location does not require visual identification if its acoustic residue contains the quality she needed. An experience does not require conventional narration if duration itself can preserve its emotional temperature.
The thirty-one-minute single-track form embodies this principle. There are no smaller titles directing attention toward separate episodes and no sequence of tracks offering repeated beginnings. The listener enters one continuous interval and remains there. Whatever internal changes occur must be discovered without the administrative assistance of a track list. The piece does not arrive as a collection of things. It arrives as a sustained condition.
Losoncy’s work often places the listener in an unusual relation to time. Ordinary recordings tend to use time as transportation, carrying us through introductions, developments, climaxes, and conclusions. Her recordings allow time to remain more stubbornly itself. Minutes accumulate without announcing what they have accomplished. Attention loosens, wanders, returns, notices a different layer, and begins constructing relationships that may belong partly to the recording and partly to the listener’s own mind.
This makes the title active throughout the piece. The recording attempts no obvious sales pitch, but sustained exposure performs a subtler persuasion. A sound initially dismissed as incidental can become indispensable after several minutes. Repetition can convince the ear that a background texture is a central event. A quiet alteration can reorganize everything heard before it. Losoncy does not necessarily argue for the importance of her materials. She gives them enough uninterrupted existence to make their own case.
The listener must also be willing to be convinced that this qualifies as a complete work. Losoncy’s practice repeatedly approaches sounds and situations that conventional listening habits classify as preliminary, accidental, private, or irrelevant. She does not disguise them with familiar musical development in order to secure their admission. She changes the frame and waits. The question is no longer whether the material can imitate recognized music, but whether the listener can revise the boundary used to exclude it.
That revision is not guaranteed. The title permits refusal. “I can be convinced” does not mean “I will accept everything.” Losoncy’s recordings preserve irritation, ambiguity, boredom, embarrassment, and the feeling that access has been granted without sufficient explanation. Some listeners may leave. Others may remain while feeling uncertain why they remain. That uncertainty is part of the work’s honesty. Persuasion cannot be meaningful unless rejection remains possible.
The cover statement makes this vulnerability explicit. Once Losoncy presents an effective substitute for something she could not fully obtain, other people are free to judge the substitute without ever knowing the original need. They may call it slight, uneventful, improperly composed, or insufficiently transformed. Yet the artist knows that the small preserved element carries a larger private structure. The audience sees a fragment; she remembers the impossible whole from which it was extracted.
This creates a striking imbalance between the size of the material and the size of its meaning. A modest recording may support an enormous invisible architecture. The listener receives the audible component but not necessarily the desire, frustration, memory, or logistical impossibility surrounding it. Losoncy does not eliminate that imbalance by explaining everything. She allows the work to stand in the vulnerable position she describes, bearing more personal weight than its surface is required to reveal.
The idea of an effective substitute also complicates the familiar distinction between documentary and invented art. Losoncy may record something that genuinely occurred, yet its function within the artwork can be highly constructed. An existing sound becomes the substitute for an unavailable experience. Reality supplies the material, while private need supplies its purpose. The recording is documentary at the level of source and imaginative at the level of use.
This may explain why her work can feel simultaneously plain and dreamlike. The sounds retain the stubborn physicality of actual events, but their selection follows an internal logic we cannot completely access. We hear the exterior evidence of an invisible arrangement. Nothing needs to become surreal through editing because its relocation into Losoncy’s private system has already changed it. An ordinary occurrence becomes the representative of something much larger than itself.
The phrase “I can be convinced” can therefore refer to Losoncy as well as her audience. Her own artistic process depends upon accepting that an elemental substitute might truly contain enough. The impossible desire says that only the complete thing will satisfy. The work answers that one essential component may preserve the reason the complete thing was wanted. Creating the record requires allowing herself to be convinced by the fragment.
That is not the same as settling. Settling abandons desire in exchange for convenience. Losoncy’s method appears more exacting. She must determine which component is actually elemental and which details merely surround it. This demands severe attention. Removing too much produces an empty shell; retaining too much may conceal the source of pleasure beneath unnecessary structure. Her art occurs in the difficult measurement between them.
The handmade text strengthens the record because it refuses the polished authority of a conventional artist statement. Corrections remain visible. Words lean, crowd one another, and occasionally resist easy reading. Thought appears materially, including its revisions and pressures. Losoncy does not present a cleanly typeset doctrine after the uncertainty has been resolved. She presents language still carrying evidence of the hand that struggled to make it operational.
The compact disc provides an unexpectedly appropriate body for this thought. A factory-produced CD is an effective substitute by design: microscopic physical information stands in for an event, preserving sound through a coded representation that can be reproduced elsewhere. Unlike her handmade CDr sets, this was glass-mastered and professionally manufactured, allowing one private interval to become a stable digital object. The impossible original experience cannot travel, but its elemental audio component can.
The RUTracker copy introduces another substitute. The manufactured disc becomes a lossless file, separated from its physical carrier and handwritten surface. Something is removed, yet something essential remains transportable. An unknown person decided that the audio deserved extraction and continued circulation. The FLAC does not recreate ownership of the original CD, but it makes another encounter operationally possible.
This anonymous preservation resembles Losoncy’s own process. The tracker contributor isolated the component that could travel: the recording itself. The disc manufacturing, physical handwriting, and circumstances of acquisition could not pass completely through the torrent, but the audio could. The resulting file is not the whole release, although the scan helps restore part of its body. It is another effective substitute, carrying enough of the object to create pleasure and thought somewhere far beyond the original edition.
There is a quiet social faith inside that act. The uploader did not know who would eventually download the file, and the future listener did not know who had protected it. No personal relationship was required. One stranger preserved a small object because another stranger might someday be convinced of its value. RUTracker became less a warehouse than a distributed argument conducted through continued availability.
This also places the listener in the vulnerable position described on the cover. To take the recording seriously is to risk devoting thirty-one minutes to material that does not promise a conventional reward. The listener must temporarily suspend the demand that every sound immediately justify itself. Attention becomes a wager: perhaps the elemental component will reveal itself, or perhaps the attempt to locate it will change what the listener considers important.
By the end, convincing may no longer mean reaching agreement with a proposition. It may mean becoming susceptible to a different scale of significance. Losoncy’s work asks whether pleasure can survive reduction, whether a fragment can carry the pressure of an impossible whole, and whether an artwork can be complete without making its private necessity fully visible.
I Can Be Convinced does not resolve those questions. It builds a durable object around them. The title remains poised between independence and connection, while the recording offers its elemental component without insisting that everybody recognize it. Losoncy has made the substitute operational. What happens next depends upon who is willing to remain within hearing distance.
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