Hanno Leichtmann: Ferrochrome

14.10.2023 – 15.10.2023 / 12:00 – 19:00

Sound installation on 60 years of DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program
Opening: 13.10.2023, 5:00-8:00 pm

In his projects and installations, Hanno Leichtmann repeatedly addresses the question of what historical music collections and technical standards can tell us. His work Ferrochrome was created for the 60th anniversary of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) and intervenes at the intersection of two series of works, which Leichtmann is connecting for the first time: his exploration of the aesthetic implications of certain playback devices and standards is combined with his creative exploration of sound archives in an effort to “make them speak.”

Following his projects with iconically designed turntables and CD players, Ferrochrome now stages two studio tape decks as interpreters of a possible overall sound from 60 years of the BKP. They reactivate performances by the many actors who built up the archive over decades, based on a format that was also developed exactly 60 years ago.

Large parts of the BKP’s sound archive, especially from the 1980s on, are available in cassette form: on VHS, U-matic, and DAT, but most of all on compact cassettes, which first became available in 1963. The holdings include some 2,000 physical recordings, featuring a wide variety of works by fellows from different generations and genres.

Leichtmann digitized parts of this material directly from the archive cabinets. From this pre-selection, he then took around 300 sound samples and processed them in his sample-based modular system. Guided by algorithmic operations and spontaneous decisions, he produced a 60-minute composition which will be distributed between two audio cassettes and their players, then played back over four independent channels.

In its smallest units as well as in its overall structure, Ferrochrome repeatedly draws on the sequence decay, attack, attack, decay (DAAD). Leichtmann transposes the fractional parts of a sound—the attack and decay of an envelope in its manifold variations—as a design principle to the entire work: a collage of attack/decay waves that swell and fade, with the micro-levels reflected on the macro-level in a constantly changing sequence of scenic acoustic patterns.

Even in the passages where speech is used as source material, the sounds do not coalesce into semantically decipherable meaning. They are manipulated beyond recognition or superimposed onto each other, and in this abstracted form they raise all the more urgent central questions: How can an archive be used productively? How to deal with its diversity? How to generate new meaning from what has been overlooked until now?

Hanno Leichtmann responds to these questions with the opposition and combination of frequencies, which become physically experienceable in a space that only comes into being through the interaction of all the elements in this experimental arrangement. Ferrochrome thus makes an unmistakable statement: an archive that doesn´t learn to speak can not be understood.

Text: Arno Raffeiner

Funded by: