Gabi Losoncy - 2017 - Nobody's Pushing You CDr

 

caduc. – CA22  134.56MB FLAC

Nobody’s Pushing You initially sounds like reassurance. It is the sort of sentence someone might offer when another person hesitates at a doorway: you do not have to continue, there is no deadline, nobody is forcing you. Yet reassurance can carry a second edge. Sometimes the sentence appears only because pressure is already present, even when nobody can identify who is applying it. The pusher may be expectation, ambition, fear, guilt, artistic identity, or the private demand to keep proving that one’s life possesses meaning. Gabi Losoncy places the sentence above a recording in which people move, travel, wait, talk, and coexist without revealing exactly what force has brought them together.

The first piece begins in motion. Footsteps and outdoor space gradually give way to a vehicle and the peculiar enclosure created by recorded travel. A car promises freedom because it can take a person elsewhere, but once the journey begins, the body is confined to a seat and the route becomes partly determined by roads, traffic, destination, and whoever else occupies the vehicle. Losoncy is especially attuned to such contradictory spaces. Her recordings often place freedom and restriction inside the same ordinary object: the hospital that protects while detaining, the microphone that reveals while obscuring, the vehicle that moves while containing.

Conversation slowly emerges, but Losoncy does not present it as dialogue that has been tidied for an audience. Voices appear from within the surrounding noise, sometimes distinct enough to attract attention and sometimes merging back into the vehicle, distance, and movement. We are not given the privileges normally granted to listeners of spoken-word recordings. Nobody introduces the speakers, explains their relationships, or tells us which remarks will become important. We enter the social environment at the same imperfect angle from which human beings usually experience one another.

The title hangs over these conversations in several possible ways. “Nobody’s pushing you” may be gentle permission. It may be an irritated response to someone who feels pressured. It may deny the existence of pressure that is clearly being felt. It may also be something Losoncy tells herself while deciding whether to continue an artistic practice that has become inseparable from her emotional survival. The phrase does not settle into one meaning because tone, speaker, and circumstance remain uncertain. Like so much of her work, it provides language while withholding the situation needed to interpret it securely.

This uncertainty is not a puzzle with one hidden solution. Losoncy is not challenging the listener to identify the car, reconstruct every sentence, and discover what really happened. She is preserving the condition of partial knowledge itself. Most social life occurs this way. We hear part of what another person says, interpret it through our own history, and then continue moving before certainty arrives. The recording captures not merely the surrounding events but the incomplete access through which events become meaningful.

A woman’s voice enters near the end of the first piece, subtly changing the social weight of what came before. A voice can reorganize an entire recording without becoming louder than its environment. Suddenly the earlier movement may feel like preparation, transit, or an approach toward an encounter. Yet Losoncy resists turning that arrival into a conventional climax. The voice does not solve the journey. It becomes another presence within it, another consciousness whose complete interior remains inaccessible to everyone else.

“Vein” moves more deeply into a public conversational space. Voices overlap with the casual acoustic debris of people occupying the same room. The effect resembles sitting in a diner, waiting area, cafeteria, or another communal place where private exchanges continually leak into public hearing. One does not deliberately eavesdrop, yet language arrives anyway. A sentence from another table enters the mind, remains there without context, and may outlive the conversation from which it escaped.

Losoncy’s recording makes this leakage into its central material. Speech is intimate because it comes from bodies, relationships, moods, and private histories, but it is also environmental sound. Once released into a room, words belong partly to the air. They travel beyond their intended recipients, collide with dishes, chairs, engines, ventilation, and other voices, then enter a recorder whose future listeners were never present in the original social arrangement. The microphone becomes a second public space nested inside the first.

The title “Vein” is wonderfully exact because a vein is both a vessel and a line running through material. Blood moves through a body in veins, mineral travels through rock in veins, and a recurring quality can run through a person’s speech or work. The conversations here behave similarly. They pass through the environment without becoming the whole environment. Human presence forms a living channel through the larger field of noise, sometimes visible at the surface and sometimes buried beneath it.

The word also introduces the body without requiring Losoncy to make the body an obvious subject. On Didn’t Take Much, her physical condition placed her inside medical observation. Here the body is no longer being measured by hospital equipment, but it remains the unseen center of everything. Feet cross ground, hands enter a vehicle, mouths produce speech, blood circulates, attention shifts, and a person carries the recorder from one acoustic condition into another. The body does not announce itself because it is busy performing the unnoticed labor of remaining alive.

What distinguishes this release from a simple document of travel and conversation is Losoncy’s willingness to preserve intervals that most editors would remove. The walk toward the vehicle, the drive, the indistinct portions of speech, and the gradual thinning of activity are not obstacles surrounding the meaningful content. They are the meaningful content. Human experience does not arrive already condensed into scenes. It contains transitions, dead time, uncertainty, muffled communication, and long periods in which the importance of what is happening cannot yet be known.

The recording therefore asks a difficult question about artistic selection. When someone decides that ordinary life should become a work, how much of life must be altered before it qualifies? Losoncy’s answer is often: very little. She chooses the duration, preserves the sequence, names the result, and places it inside an object. Her restraint does not mean that no composition has occurred. It means that composition has moved away from arranging sounds and toward arranging attention.

The booklet makes that process unusually visible. Its painted surfaces are saturated with yellow, ochre, brown, black, and white, full of sweeping movements that look bodily and immediate. Elsewhere, the imagery becomes almost anti-spectacular: dirt, leaves, plain fields of pink and pale yellow, and an irregular maze-like drawing populated by hands. These pages do not illustrate the recording in any straightforward way. They create an alternate route through the same emotional territory, moving between abundance and emptiness, ground and abstraction, confinement and touch.

The maze drawing is especially fitting. Its corridors are not cleanly engineered, and the hands appearing among them suggest both reaching and obstruction. A hand can guide, push, hold, protect, restrain, or ask another person to follow. The album’s title denies the push while the drawing quietly fills the page with possible agents of contact. Losoncy seems less interested in declaring that freedom has been achieved than in examining the tangled forms through which encouragement, coercion, care, and self-direction become difficult to separate.

The nearly blank color spreads are equally important. After the density of recorded conversation and painted motion, a field of pink or pale yellow offers no instructions. These pages may appear empty, but they create breathing room inside an object assembled during what Losoncy describes as a complicated period of inner work. The absence of content becomes permission not to produce more content. A page can remain nearly blank. A conversation can recede. A project can stop without being defeated.

Her handwritten statement transforms the entire release. She explains that her work began as an intense attempt to create a meaningful and sustainable use for her feelings and instincts. By following her own mind with great seriousness, she found greater inner strength. That is a remarkable description of art not as career, entertainment, or aesthetic experiment, but as a structure built to survive inside. The recordings were a kind of personal architecture: rooms where she could collide with her own thoughts, examine them, and continue growing.

Yet the statement does not end by promising to build the same rooms forever. Losoncy recognizes that repeating the process after it has served its purpose could become false and suffocating. That recognition may be the deepest crisis in any serious artistic life. A method can rescue its creator and later become another enclosure. The identity one fought to establish can begin issuing orders. What was once freedom becomes obligation, particularly when an audience, label, or reputation starts expecting the artist to remain recognizable.

Nobody’s Pushing You is therefore not merely about escaping pressure from other people. It concerns the moment when an artist stops pushing herself toward a version of authenticity that has already been achieved. Losoncy does not reject the earlier work or dismiss the emotional need that produced it. She acknowledges that it worked. The structure gave her something valuable, but gratitude does not require permanent residence.

This makes the ordinary social movement in the recordings feel newly significant. Walking toward a car, traveling with other people, entering a public place, and hearing surrounding conversation become signs of re-entry. After so much work directed toward the interior, Losoncy records herself among others. She does not arrive with a declaration or an explanatory narration. She simply returns to shared space, where no single person controls the sounds and no private thought can completely organize the world.

The two pieces trace this movement elegantly. The title track travels, carrying the listener through a sequence of changing environments and human presences. “Vein” remains more immersed in collective speech, as though the journey has entered a social bloodstream. The first piece approaches; the second circulates. Losoncy’s voice and identity do not need to dominate either one. Returning to the world may involve accepting that the world will continue talking over, around, and without you.

There is considerable courage in making a work about loosening one’s grip on the work. Experimental artists are often praised for extremity, commitment, and refusal to compromise, but those values can form another disciplinary machine. Continuing indefinitely is not always bravery. Sometimes bravery means noticing that a private command has expired. Nobody’s Pushing You contains the relief and uncertainty of discovering that the door is unlocked after one has spent years constructing the room.

The CDr edition gives that discovery a complete physical body. Audio alone carries the journey and conversation, but the booklet reveals the thinking, painting, photography, empty space, and hand-drawn pathways surrounding it. It is not simply supplementary packaging. It shows an artist testing several modes of expression at once, perhaps because no single mode could contain the transition she was experiencing. The recording listens outward while the booklet speaks from within.

This RUTracker version creates its own unusual form of survival. The audio has traveled without the original handmade edition, but the scans preserve enough of the booklet to keep the recording from becoming an anonymous pair of FLAC files. Someone did more than extract the disc. They carried the visual object along, allowing later listeners to encounter the dirt, painted currents, empty colors, maze, handwriting, and photograph of the disc lying on the ground.

That act of preservation feels particularly valuable here because the booklet changes what the title means. Without it, Nobody’s Pushing You could remain an enigmatic field recording built around travel and overheard speech. With it, the album becomes evidence of a personal threshold: an artist recognizing that the system she created to understand herself had succeeded sufficiently for her to move beyond it. The scans restore part of the thought process that ordinary digital circulation might have discarded.

The unknown RUTracker contributor becomes another quiet participant in Losoncy’s return to the world. A hundred-copy Canadian CDr passed into someone’s drive, became files and images, entered a Russian tracker, and eventually arrived in this archive. The original social environment expanded far beyond the people in the car or public room. Listeners who were never expected, in countries never addressed, now occupy the outermost edge of the conversation.

Nobody’s Pushing You does not offer freedom as a triumphant break through a wall. Its freedom is gentler and stranger. The pressure diminishes, voices continue around us, and movement becomes possible again. Nothing spectacular announces that a life has changed direction. A person gets into a vehicle, listens, enters the company of others, and gradually discovers that the world remains available.

The recording ends, but the sentence keeps working: nobody is pushing you. It may be reassurance, warning, permission, disbelief, or an invitation to identify the invisible force that has been doing the pushing all along. For Losoncy, it seems to contain another possibility. Having built a palace of connection inside herself, she no longer needed to remain there guarding it. She could leave the door open and return to the world.

Gabi Losoncy - 2017 - Security Besides Love

 

Recital  – Recital Twenty Eight  161.73MB FLAC

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.

Gabi Losoncy - 2019 - I Can Be Convinced

 

Self-released – none  82.87MB FLAC

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.

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.

The Rita + Gabi Losoncy - 2020 - Women Say The Darndest Things

 

Evidence Tapes – EVD003  142.37MB FLAC

Women Say the Darndest Things begins with a voice that is already pretending to be another voice. Gabi Losoncy does not appear here as the diarist, patient, traveler, or solitary speaker encountered across her solo recordings. She performs impersonations of Andrea Martin and supplies the source sounds, which Sam McKinlay then places within the dense electronic language of The Rita. Before the listener can locate an original identity, the voice has already passed through memory, imitation, recording, transformation, and noise.

Andrea Martin is an especially rich subject for this treatment because so much of her comedy depends upon transformation. Her voice, posture, accent, age, and personality could change radically from one character to another. Losoncy is therefore impersonating a performer whose own art often involved disappearing into constructed identities. The source is already unstable before The Rita begins working upon it.

Impersonation is not merely copying. A performer chooses which traits carry the identity strongly enough to survive exaggeration. A vowel is stretched, a rhythm of speech becomes more pronounced, or a slight vocal mannerism is enlarged until it can temporarily stand in for an entire person. In that sense, impersonation and harsh noise share a method. Both isolate characteristics and push them beyond ordinary proportion.

The Rita’s electronics do not accompany Losoncy in any conventional sense. The voice is not placed clearly above an instrumental background, carrying language while the noise supplies atmosphere. Instead, voice and electronics enter the same physical field. A consonant may become a scrape. A breath can merge with static. A comic inflection can become another pressure change inside the larger wall.

This damages the usual authority of speech. Words ordinarily demand that listeners pursue their meaning while ignoring much of their physical sound. Once buried or fragmented, language loses that automatic privilege. The listener begins searching for pitch, cadence, breath, grain, and emotional temperature. We may not always understand what is being said, but we hear more clearly what a voice is made from.

The result does not simply erase Losoncy. Her presence becomes difficult to stabilize. Fragments rise through the electronics and disappear before they can be securely identified. The listener may hear comedy, theatricality, irritation, fear, absurdity, intimacy, or deliberate awkwardness, but no single interpretation remains in control. The voice becomes more elusive precisely because it is so physically close.

That condition connects this collaboration directly to Losoncy’s solo work. Her recordings repeatedly demonstrate that proximity does not guarantee understanding. A microphone can enter a hospital room, a moving vehicle, a public conversation, severe weather, or an intensely private encounter while leaving the actual meaning partially inaccessible. Here, The Rita turns that uncertainty into an explicit sonic structure. The person is present, yet access to the person is continually interrupted.

Harsh noise can appear static from a distance, but patient listening reveals constant internal motion. Frequencies push forward and retreat. Rough layers collide. Tiny ruptures pass through denser regions. A voice alters the surface from within even when no individual word can be recovered. The wall is less a solid object than a crowded atmosphere whose weather changes at a microscopic scale.

Losoncy’s contribution gives that atmosphere a peculiar elasticity. Impersonation depends upon movement between identities, while The Rita’s wall appears to resist movement by maintaining sustained pressure. One participant mutates; the other persists. The music forms in the struggle between those qualities.

The two pieces are named only “Andrea Martin 1” and “Andrea Martin 2,” as though they were experiments, files, or evidence samples rather than chapters of a conventional album. Nothing in the titles tells us which characters are being invoked, what circumstances produced the performances, or what distinction separates the two sides. Numbering replaces explanation.

Their nearly identical lengths strengthen the sense of two controlled exposures to the same idea. The cassette does not offer one short introduction followed by a major statement, nor does the second side provide relief from the first. Each side contains approximately fifteen minutes of voice subjected to electronic pressure. Turning the tape over places the listener back inside the apparatus from another angle.

The physical cassette originally made that division unavoidable. After the first piece, the machine stopped. The listener had to remove the cassette, reverse it, and begin again. That brief handling ritual separated two related surfaces without pretending they were independent worlds. The digital copy preserves the two-part structure, although a media player can now cross the boundary almost instantly.

There is humor inside the severity. Harsh noise is often described through solemn language about extremity, endurance, punishment, and sensory overload. Impersonation introduces exaggeration of another kind: the theatrical vowel, unstable accent, sudden personality, and pleasure of a voice knowingly becoming artificial. Comedy and noise both push recognizable behavior until it begins revealing its machinery.

Using Andrea Martin impersonations as source material also refuses the assumption that serious experimental work requires officially serious content. Losoncy does not reach for a political address, sacred text, tragic testimony, or historically monumental recording to justify the intensity. She brings an act connected to television comedy into the noise apparatus and allows its apparent slightness to become one of the record’s strengths.

Somewhere inside the abrasion remains the knowledge that a person was performing another person’s voice. There may have been pleasure in attempting the impression, amusement in its failure, private associations with Martin’s characters, or fascination with the sound of the attempt itself. The electronics obscure the original comic event, but they do not entirely remove its playful instability. The wall contains a joke after its setup and punchline have dissolved into texture.

The title adds another layer of control and resistance. “Women say the darndest things” belongs to a familiar type of framing in which women’s speech is treated as unpredictable, charming, troublesome, or amusing material for someone else to collect. The phrase reduces expression to a novelty while maintaining a smile. On this cassette, the female voice refuses to remain a clean specimen. It multiplies, changes identity, enters static, and becomes impossible to summarize.

The Rita’s processing can therefore be heard as both concealment and protection. The wall prevents the voice from being easily collected, judged, or converted into a tidy quotation. It surrounds the speech with distortion thick enough to function as armor. Yet armor also restricts movement and contact. The same electronics that protect the voice from simple interpretation prevent it from reaching the listener intact.

This ambiguity resembles the surreal description supplied by Evidence Tapes. A stranded person encounters headlights in the fog, then feels muted by a large, warm hand whose steady pulse seems both reassuring and overwhelming. The image cannot decide whether rescue and capture are separate events. The hand protects, silences, carries, and restrains at once.

Harsh noise wall frequently generates that contradiction. Its complete surface can feel like shelter because outside distraction disappears. Attention no longer has to chase a conventional sequence of changing musical events. The listener enters one sustained condition. Yet the same completeness can feel like confinement, as though every exit has been covered by sound.

Losoncy’s impersonations prevent that enclosure from becoming anonymous. The human source keeps disturbing the impression of a perfectly impersonal wall. A partial syllable, vocal contour, or sudden trace of character reminds us that the texture contains performance. The electronics may dominate the surface, but they cannot completely remove the body concealed within it.

The collaboration also expands ideas that appear throughout Losoncy’s work concerning substitutes and fragments. An impersonation is an effective substitute for the physical presence of another person. It does not reproduce Andrea Martin completely, but it isolates recognizable components of voice and behavior. The Rita then isolates further components from Losoncy’s performance, turning vocal material into grain, pulse, density, and interruption.

Every stage removes information while creating another possibility. Andrea Martin becomes Losoncy’s memory or interpretation of Andrea Martin. That interpretation becomes recorded source material. The source becomes electronic noise. The noise becomes a cassette and later a digital file. There is no untouched original waiting at the center. There is only a chain of transformations, each carrying enough of the previous stage to produce the next one.

This makes authorship pleasantly difficult to divide. The Rita is credited with the electronics, but those electronics are shaped around material supplied by Losoncy. Losoncy contributes the voices, yet those voices depend upon her relationship to Andrea Martin’s performances. The work belongs to the contact zone between all three identities rather than settling comfortably inside any one of them.

The word “source” in the credits is especially suggestive. A source is supposed to be a beginning, but these sounds already have histories. Losoncy’s impersonations arise from remembered performances, cultural recognition, and her own vocal habits. Once The Rita processes them, the supposed beginning becomes another interior layer. The source is not behind the music. It remains trapped inside it.

That entrapment gives the record its emotional charge. Hearing a voice partially buried creates a powerful urge to retrieve it. We lean toward the sound, attempting to separate human intention from electronic pressure. The more difficult the retrieval becomes, the more strongly the voice can seem to matter. Concealment produces attention.

Yet the record never promises that persistence will be rewarded with complete comprehension. Careful listening may reveal additional detail without solving the identity of every sound. This refusal is important. The collaboration is not a code in which all noise can eventually be translated back into clear speech. Transformation has genuinely occurred. Some information has become something else.

That irreversible change is one reason the album feels more imaginative than a simple voice-and-noise collaboration. The electronics are not a curtain that could be pulled aside to reveal an untouched vocal performance. Voice and wall have altered one another. The source material gives the wall human irregularity, while the wall changes how the source can ever be heard again.

The 2026 FLAC copy adds another stage to that movement. The original cassette was a magnetic object divided into two sides, while the digital transfer presents its sound as lossless files separated from tape mechanics, shell, and physical handling. The audio can now travel without the cassette, although it carries the sonic character of some unidentified playback and transfer process.

Lossless encoding preserves the information supplied to it, but it does not make a transfer neutral. Tape condition, deck alignment, playback speed, head response, gain, analog-to-digital conversion, and other decisions still influence what enters the FLAC. This version therefore remains one encounter with the cassette rather than a transparent replacement for every physical copy.

Its route through RUTracker is appropriate for a work built from unstable transmission. Somebody preserved the recording, identified it, and placed it into a distributed system where strangers could continue carrying it. The uploader’s identity and technical chain may be unknown, but the act of preservation remains audible in the file’s continued existence.

The album began with impersonation and survives through reproduction. Neither process produces perfect sameness. An impersonation changes the person imitated; a tape transfer changes the object transferred. What matters is not flawless duplication but the survival of enough recognizable pressure to create another encounter.

Women Say the Darndest Things ultimately refuses to keep voice, identity, comedy, and noise in their assigned territories. A comic performer becomes the subject of another performer. Impersonation becomes source material. Speech becomes texture. Electronic severity retains an undercurrent of humor. A cassette becomes data and crosses through an anonymous international network.

The original phrase attempts to contain women’s speech by declaring it amusingly unpredictable. Losoncy and The Rita answer by making the voice genuinely uncontrollable. It cannot be cleanly quoted, placed in one identity, or separated from the static surrounding it. The recording gives speech too many possible bodies to remain inside the old frame.

Somewhere within these two walls, Gabi Losoncy is pretending to be Andrea Martin. The imitation survives not as a stable portrait but as a persistent pulse, repeatedly approaching recognition and then slipping away. The darndest thing is not simply what the voice says. It is how much of a person can remain after language has been transformed into weather.

Boon . Sijstermans . Cater . Singh . Losoncy . Shirokov . Vriezen - 2022 - amsterdam . berlin . moscow losoncy 2xCD

 

Edition Wandelweiser Records – EWR 2122-23  462.08MB FLAC

The title looks like a list of places until it quietly stops behaving like one: Amsterdam, Berlin, Moscow, Losoncy. Three cities and then one person, with no grammatical signal announcing the change. Gabi Losoncy is not presented merely as another contributor to a compilation. Her name becomes a location, another distant territory from which sound arrives. The title redraws the map so that a private artistic consciousness can occupy the same geographic rank as three European capitals.

That strange promotion contains the central idea of the entire double album. Amsterdam . Berlin . Moscow Losoncy was assembled from relationships stretched across cities, rooms, recording systems, histories, languages, and differing ideas about what music should be. Curator Dante Boon does not pretend that these distances have been defeated. The album instead explores what kinds of togetherness become possible when people are not fully together.

Much of the material was realized during the pandemic, when musicians who might ordinarily have rehearsed, adjusted their tuning in one another’s presence, or responded to the same room had to work separately. Parts were recorded in homes and studios across several cities, then combined later. This was not merely a technical inconvenience surrounding the compositions. Separation entered the music itself.

A conventional ensemble shares air. Players hear the same resonance, watch one another breathe, and make tiny unconscious corrections while a note is sounding. A remote ensemble replaces some of that bodily information with instructions, trust, memory, files, and delayed decisions. Nobody hears the complete performance while producing their individual part. The whole exists first as an idea and only later as a recording.

That resembles faith more than rehearsal. Each performer contributes to a future event they cannot yet experience. Their sound travels outward without immediate confirmation that it has found the others. Only after the pieces have been assembled do the separated rooms become one acoustic proposition.

The album does not conceal those seams. Tiny differences in pitch, attack, room tone, and bodily timing become expressive precisely because the performers were not gathered beneath one tuning standard or one ceiling. Distance does not simply weaken the ensemble. It supplies another form of counterpoint.

Dante Boon’s “the heart’s size” opens the first disc with music of almost weightless concentration. Dylan Thomas’s language enters through voice, piano, and the peculiar intimacy created when a song seems to be discovering how little support it needs. Its brevity is important. The piece does not construct a grand gateway into a double album. It opens a small human aperture through which the rest can pass.

The voice throughout this collection is rarely asked to behave like the commanding center of a song. It appears beside instruments rather than ruling them, carrying poems while leaving space around individual words. Text is not fitted into a dramatic conveyor belt. A phrase can remain exposed long enough for its sound, uncertainty, and physical delivery to become as important as its literal meaning.

Germaine Sijstermans’s “M” expands that attention across more than twenty minutes. Its sequence of dyads is interpreted by several smaller groupings whose resonances overlap and complement one another. The music grows through placement rather than accumulation. Notes are breathed into existence, allowed to remain, and then released without the usual pressure to convert each sound into forward motion.

This is one of the qualities commonly associated with Wandelweiser, although the album immediately demonstrates how broad that association can become. Silence is not treated as empty real estate between meaningful notes. It is the condition that permits a note to possess edges. We hear when a sound begins, how it occupies the room, when another resonance touches it, and the exact moment when its absence becomes newly audible.

“Sparing” music is sometimes mistaken for music without abundance. “M” demonstrates the opposite. A restricted number of tones can produce a huge field of relationships when listeners are given time to hear their interiors. Each dyad contains beating frequencies, breath, touch, decay, memory of the preceding sound, and expectation of whatever may follow. Fewer objects create more room around every object.

Seamus Cater’s “tree space: the trees they do grow high” approaches an old folk song by turning its materials into a branching score. Rather than treating tradition as a fixed melody that must be preserved beneath glass, the composition allows performers to move through it as they might move through a tree. A branch can be followed, abandoned, revisited from another direction, or perceived as part of a structure too large to see all at once.

The folk source gives the album a relationship to transmission older than digital files. Songs also travel without remaining identical. They pass through bodies, regions, memories, missing verses, altered pitches, and people who learned them from someone whose name may already be gone. The remote recordings on this album are new technological versions of an ancient condition: music reaching another person through an incomplete chain.

Boon’s “depression (herbeck)” sets a compact poem by Ernst Herbeck, whose language can feel simultaneously plain, wounded, logical, and impossible. The voice and piano do not dramatize depression as a swelling emotional spectacle. They sound as though ordinary musical movement has become difficult and each gesture must discover a reason to continue.

A major scale appears almost estranged from itself. Something learned at the beginning of musical education, supposedly neutral and effortless, now carries the awkwardness of a body being asked to perform a familiar task under unfamiliar weight. The simplicity does not reassure. It exposes how much effort can hide inside an action that appears simple from outside.

Rishin Singh’s “trauermusik” creates grief through disagreement rather than melodic lament. The participating musicians were instructed to tune their A individually to something other than the standard 440 cycles per second. Each begins from a slightly different foundation. When their sounds meet, the mismatch produces beating, pressure, tenderness, and an inability to settle into one communal certainty.

That is an extraordinary image of mourning. Grieving people may gather around the same absence while remaining internally tuned to different realities. One person feels numb, another furious, another relieved, another devastated. They appear to inhabit one ceremony but cannot occupy exactly the same emotional pitch.

The piece does not force reconciliation. Its beauty comes from allowing the individual tunings to coexist. The ensemble is created through difference rather than through eliminating difference. Unity is no longer everybody agreeing on A. It is everybody continuing to sound while hearing that the others began elsewhere.

The remote-recording process deepens that condition. Some participants supplied their sounds from separate cities without hearing the assembled result. Their tuning decisions entered a future collective space. The music became a meeting organized around mutual absence, which is also one of the structures of grief.

Boon’s “for what” brings the first disc toward its close through dyads, solitary notes, and chords that seem to ask how little can be said without saying nothing. The score dates from June 2020, when protests spread after the killing of George Floyd. The title does not pretend that a piano composition can resolve political violence. It remains a question, possibly directed toward music itself.

For what is this sound? What can concentrated listening accomplish while injustice continues outside the room? Is beauty a retreat, an act of mourning, a means of sustaining attention, or simply another privilege exercised while others are endangered? The piece does not answer by becoming louder or rhetorically heroic. It permits the question to remain inside fragile intervals.

Then the first disc ends. The listener crosses a physical boundary, changes CDs, and enters Losoncy.

“Tighter” begins the second disc like an object dropped into a carefully arranged room. After voices, poetry, piano tones, winds, strings, harmonies, and breath-shaped silence, Losoncy presents a dry field of repeated impacts and clattering activity. Reviewers have compared it to a typewriter, but identifying the exact source is less important than hearing what its arrival does to the album.

Her sound appears to possess none of the social etiquette surrounding the preceding compositions. It does not introduce its materials, reveal a score, cite a poem, or explain what relationship it has to the performers gathered elsewhere. It simply begins happening.

This is not a rejection of the album’s sensitivity. It is another test of it. The earlier pieces ask listeners to attend to tiny differences within restrained tones. Losoncy asks whether the same quality of attention can be extended to an unidentified everyday sound that has not been polished into recognizable musical dignity.

The clatter is repetitive but not regular enough to become a dependable beat. Each impact sounds related to the others while retaining its own pressure, spacing, and surface. The ear searches for a mechanism. Is somebody operating an object? Is the sound produced intentionally, or has Losoncy discovered an activity already occurring? Is “tighter” an instruction, a condition, a description of physical pressure, or a wish that the pattern would finally close around itself?

The title alters the sound without solving it. Tightening suggests drawing separate parts together, reducing slack, increasing tension, closing a gap, or making something fit more securely. During the pandemic, life became tighter in several contradictory senses. Movement narrowed. Domestic space carried more weight. Social structures strained. People were kept apart while communications networks pulled their images and voices into unprecedented proximity.

Losoncy’s piece may have no literal connection to any of those circumstances, yet its placement allows them to resonate around it. A repeated physical action occupies an enclosed duration. The sound seems close, almost without acoustic distance, while its cause remains inaccessible. We are connected to it and excluded from it simultaneously.

That makes “tighter” an ideal center for this collection. The other contributors frequently create togetherness from shared compositional systems. Losoncy contributes an event whose system remains private. She is included not because her work resembles theirs on the surface, but because it reveals another boundary around the same question: how can one person’s experience reach another without surrendering its difference?

Her name in the title now makes perfect sense. Amsterdam, Berlin, and Moscow indicate locations where musicians, scenes, and practices have formed. “Losoncy” indicates a fourth location governed by another set of conditions. It is not a city one can visit physically. It is an artistic jurisdiction where found events, private logic, bodily action, mundane technology, and withheld explanation possess their own laws.

Calling Losoncy a place also avoids demanding that she become an official representative of herself. A person is expected to explain intentions and provide biography. A place can be entered without being exhausted. Visitors notice surfaces, weather, recurring structures, and local customs while understanding that most lives inside it remain unknown.

“Tighter” lasts long enough to reorganize the ear. Initially it appears alien to the program. By its conclusion, the pieces surrounding it begin sounding different. Piano attacks reveal their percussive bodies. Instrumental mechanisms become more noticeable. The click of a key, movement of a valve, impact of a hammer, and physical labor required to create every delicate tone can no longer remain completely hidden.

Losoncy does not destroy the album’s refinement. She reveals the objects underneath it.

Kirill Shirokov’s radical arrangement of Josef Matthias Hauer’s “atonale musik nr. 1” follows immediately, creating a remarkable transition. Hauer’s historical twelve-tone thinking is not treated as untouchable doctrine. Shirokov receives the composition across a century and allows it to enter his own musical language. After Losoncy’s unexplained impacts, even this conversation with European modernism sounds newly material, as if notation itself were another object being handled.

Hauer is sometimes remembered as the “other” inventor of twelve-tone composition, standing beside and outside the more dominant history attached to Arnold Schoenberg. His presence suits an album concerned with networks that do not necessarily pass through the officially recognized center. History, like geography, changes according to which route is followed.

“2019IX26 (quintet)” opens a much larger field. Its pointillist harmonies shift gradually while the ensemble’s separately recorded components create the sensation of perspectives arriving from different rooms. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” stands behind the composition, another text in which the individual self expands until it contains relations, strangers, bodies, landscapes, and contradictions.

The quintet does not present collectivity as massed agreement. Sparse notes enter a shared area, meet briefly, and retreat. Tiny pitch differences become emotional information. The musicians may not have occupied the same room, but the completed recording permits their sounds to discover one another after the fact.

This posthumous quality belongs to all recorded music, though remote construction makes it unusually visible. A musician plays toward collaborators who are not presently audible. Later, an editor or mixer permits the sounds to meet. The encounter occurs after each person has already finished performing.

A recording can therefore create a social event that never happened in ordinary time. The participants become an ensemble only inside playback.

Shirokov’s “a dream,” drawing upon William Blake, compresses another journey into a few minutes. Blake’s lost ant, glow-worm, beetle, night watchman, and search for home fit the album’s geography beautifully. Small beings navigate darkness through signals supplied by other small beings. Guidance does not descend from a commanding celestial authority. It glows near the ground.

That is also how this collection understands connection. No single composition explains the whole. One work provides a tiny light by which the next can be approached. A folk melody illuminates remote transmission. Separate tunings illuminate grief. Losoncy’s clatter illuminates instrumental matter. A historical score illuminates the instability of official histories.

Samuel Vriezen’s “linking” closes the second disc with a system built from cards containing short motives. Performers attempt to connect those motives through shared pitches, but Dante Boon realizes the composition alone at the piano. One musician becomes an ensemble by distributing several voices beneath his fingers.

This is the album’s final and most elegant paradox. After so much effort to create ensembles across distances, the concluding ensemble contains only one body. Polyphony does not require several people to be physically present. Difference can occur inside a single performer, just as isolation can persist inside a crowd.

The short motives in “linking” meet through common notes, form temporary relationships, and then separate. That procedure provides a model for the entire release. These composers do not share one obvious style. Their materials range from folk song and poetry to sustained tones, distorted tuning, historical modernism, private sound recording, and solitary piano. The common pitches appear between them only when the sequence is heard.

The album is therefore less a compilation than an experiment in curatorial counterpoint. Boon does not prove that every contributor belongs to one movement. He allows the listener to discover connections that may not have existed before the works were placed together.

Wandelweiser is often described through silence, duration, and reduction, but this collection reveals something broader: a culture of trust. Composers trust limited materials. Performers trust tones that are not immediately directed toward climax. Remote musicians trust parts they cannot yet hear together. Curators trust that difference need not be corrected into uniformity. Listeners are trusted to remain without constant instruction.

Losoncy tests that trust most severely. “Tighter” offers no clear bridge into the surrounding language, yet it receives the most conspicuous position possible: her surname completes the album title, and her track opens the second disc. The apparent outsider becomes a structural hinge.

This may be why “Losoncy” feels more important than the usual “featuring Gabi Losoncy” credit. Featuring would imply a guest temporarily entering somebody else’s established territory. The title performs the opposite gesture. It redraws the territory around her.

The cover supports that interpretation through its network of lines, names, separations, and implied routes. The cities are not presented as stable monuments. They function as nodes through which people, recordings, scores, and files pass. Losoncy becomes another node because artistic identity can organize relations as powerfully as geography.

The two-CD format matters. A playlist could make the eleven works feel like individually accessible selections, each available for extraction according to taste. The physical divide asks the listener to experience a first gathering, stop, then enter another. “Tighter” stands on the far side of that interruption like customs at a new border.

The RUTracker FLAC preserves the double-disc sequence while also removing the need to handle the discs. That makes the track divisions easier to cross, but it introduces another form of virtual meeting. A German physical edition organized by a Dutch curator, involving musicians across several countries and one American sound artist, was transferred by an unknown participant into a Russian file-sharing network and eventually arrived here.

The route resembles the album’s own production. People who may never meet contribute separate actions to a shared future object. One person composes. Another performs remotely. Another mixes. Another manufactures the CDs. Another acquires them, extracts the audio, creates a torrent, and seeds it toward strangers. Later listeners assemble the meaning at the far end.

None possesses the entire network. Each keeps one section functioning.

This also explains why the album belongs naturally within an archive interested in multiple transfers and physical histories. Amsterdam . Berlin . Moscow Losoncy is already about versions of presence. The ensemble exists across local rooms and combined recordings. The CD exists as a physical edition and as files. The music is both carefully composed and dependent upon accidents of distance, tuning, equipment, and timing.

“Tighter” remains the unanswered object at its center. We do not need to identify the source in order to recognize its function. It is the sound that refuses to become fluent in the album’s language, thereby revealing that the language was never singular.

A weaker compilation might have used Losoncy as a novelty, placing her abrasive little mystery between elegant compositions for contrast. This sequence grants her greater authority. She changes the meaning of elegance around her. After “tighter,” restraint can no longer be confused with refinement, and noise can no longer be confused with excess. Both may result from listening closely to a small number of events.

The double album ultimately proposes a form of community that does not require everyone to become alike. Some participants share scenes, ensembles, compositional ideas, or long-standing relationships. Losoncy appears from somewhere else and remains somewhere else. Her distance is not corrected. It is given a place on the map.

That may be the most hopeful thing about this pandemic-era recording. Togetherness is often imagined as the elimination of separation, but much human connection depends upon respecting separateness. Another person does not need to become fully understandable before their presence can change the room. Their sound can arrive from a distant city, an unfamiliar practice, or a private logic and still alter what becomes possible for everyone around it.

Amsterdam, Berlin, and Moscow are cities connected by travel, history, technology, and art. Losoncy is a city connected by attention. Its buildings are recordings, its streets are incomplete explanations, its weather is physical sound, and its border remains open without pretending that entry grants total knowledge.

By the end of “linking,” the map has folded inward. One pianist contains several voices. Several cities occupy one album. Separate tunings create one grief. Old poems enter new bodies. A woman making unidentified clattering sounds becomes a capital.

The musicians were not quite together, the album is not quite a portrait of a scene, and the title is not quite a list of locations. That persistent “not quite” is not a deficiency. It is the space where relation becomes possible. Complete fusion would erase the very distances through which these sounds learn to speak to one another.

Anyone who knows the physical source or original circumstances of Losoncy’s “tighter” may possess one of the album’s missing street names. Yet the piece does not need that information to perform its deeper work. It enters an established network, remains unmistakably itself, and proves that belonging need not require assimilation.