ANDREAS TROBOLLOWITSCH feat. ALEX KRANABETTER and MARTIN EBERLE

he grooves of a record are traces of past sonic events – in a sense, vibrations frozen in time. It is thus that a record actually also embodies an aural sculpture whose multidimensional morphology lies slumbering in a two-dimensional disc. If the disc is rotated, a sensitive needle can set free the spectrogram captured in its spiraling canyons of sound once more – something like a seismograph in reverse, mirroring time and translating the recordings back into vibration. The resulting fluctuations in air pressure create pockets of turbulence in space-time, atmospheric micro-detonations, some of them strong enough to blow holes through the fabric of our everyday lives and open up short-lived, fragile areas of free space: playgrounds for alternate nows, rehearsal spaces for counterworlds, portals into different dimensions.

The sonic alchemy of rotating objects is the focus of a substantial part of Trobollowitsch's curiosity. Around 2020, one such object was set up inside the Kleiner Wasserspeicher in Berlin: a sound installation based on a turntable 2 meters in diameter. The music emanating from it was made by 2 trumpet players sitting on its colossal surface, facing outward and turning in circles at a leisurely 8 rpm. They regularly rotated past 6 holes, each of them 16 centimeters in diameter, that were themselves the openings of 4- to 6-meter-long pipes that were arranged radially around this gyroscope of sound in a charming construction devised with a keen sense for the idiosyncrasies of the employed materials. The pipes transformed the acoustic impulses of the instruments, organised according to a special written score and enriched with the resonant energy of the materials used in the construction, into an extensive acoustic topography of wandering, overlapping, and mutually permeating sonic clouds, pulsing fuzzily and constantly in flux, through which the audience strolled.

An edited recording of the event can now be heard on this record – a product that, to be sure, first had to be pressed into the two-dimensionality described above, the modest form of which – as we now know – is the substrate of a multilayered conjunctive machine: a vinyl-based 'plane of consistency' able to fold, deform, and compress time and space so deftly that one has the impression of hearing echoes of distant worlds and times – 'everything everywhere all at once.' Who knows what a shower of tachyons pattering on the membrane of our reality sounds like? Who has heard the friction manifested by possibility particles as they cross our living rooms on their journey through the multiverses? And what sound do portals to parallel worlds make when they open and close? I haven't the faintest idea – but this record is a fantastic soundtrack to contemplate it all…

— Hans-Jürgen Hauptmann 

(label info)