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Review: 'Kubin, Felix'
'Chromdioxidgedächtnis'   

-  Album: 'Chromdioxidgedächtnis' -  Label: 'Gagarin Records'
-  Genre: 'Soundtrack'

Our Rating:
Tape hiss, crackly answerphone messages and bizarre condenser mic recordings are all integral to the material that appears on Kubin’s latest offering, which comes as a box set containing a CD and a ferric oxide audiocassette. And very nice it looks too, accompanied as it is by a lavish booklet in English and German.

This isn’t simply an exploratory gimmick or art piece, but a sincere homage to the experience of life before the compact disc and the MP3. Nothing as brash as a lo-fi tribute to the audiocassette, Kubin presents here something that encapsulates the full spectrum of cassette culture. Overdubbing, stretching, drop-ins, cut-outs and mangled tape are things we all accepted as part of the way we interacted with sound not so very long ago, and while tape releases are coming back in ultra-hip circles, there’s something missing from this revivalist replay that fails to capture the true spirit of everything the compact cassette represented. Recording songs off the radio, the mixtape.

The CD contains nine tracks, and it’s a suitably mixed – in the old-school sense – bag. Doorbells, ambient recordings, snippets of radio pieces about Kubin himself... thumping drums and snippets of dialogue and random announcements in multiple languages, clicks, whirrs and hiss... lots of hiss – all mesh into one another to formulate the fabric of this gloriously retro set.

‘Radio Collage’ is amongst the most interesting, and is composed of cut-ups, drop-ins, spliced noises and bits and bobs of radio plays and songs all mashed together to fore a piece that stands as the epitome of postmodernism, William Burroughs style.

The cassette – a C60 – features a 30-minute assemblage on side one entitled ‘Sounds from the archive’ which occupies side 1 in its entirety, and an interview with artist and former Philips employee Wim Langenhoff, which makes for interesting listening, and occupies the first 16 and a half minutes of side 2.

It’s not necessarily the easiest or most accessible of releases, but it has a real vibe to it that anyone over the age of 35 will definitely feel a strong affinity to. For those who didn’t grow up with audiocassettes, it’s a keenly educational pice – and it looks great too.

Felix Kubin Online
  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Kubin, Felix - Chromdioxidgedächtnis