estlin usher
2021, Amateur Electronics

https://amateurelectronics.bandcamp.com/album/siegfried-cut

[AE-16]

This release was made with contact mics and wire in place of a turntable’s needle, scraping their way through vinyl, still softly playing somehow – yet degrading the sound source with each new turn. This is Wagner cut and emasculated into an entirely new form.

Note from the artist (included as insert in physical copies):

All art is political. Siegfried Cut uses Wagner’s music recorded with contact microphones and wire in place of a turntable needle, cutting and disfiguring the wax while allowing the trace of a sound to carry through. Source material from “The Glorious Sounds of Wagner,” performed by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra (Columbia Masterworks, 1963).

Leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod!
Leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod:
leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod!

Note for the listener: The specter of Wagner haunts the concert hall to this day. Despite his abhorrent history, his work continues to be performed every year by opera companies and orchestras around the world, and is eagerly attended by an audience of hundreds of thousands. Classical music is a beast cornered by its history; while it sacrifices its young—the thousands of new classical pieces composed each year rarely are performed more than once—it reifies the darkest corners of our collective Western history. A grotesque apologetics for the stain of white, Western hegemony. In trying to reconcile this for myself, I wanted to find a technique that used and criticized Wagner’s music without putting it on a pedestal or in the concert hall. Although with this release I am complicit in the re-production of Wagner’s work, the intent is to disfigure and “deturn” the music. To overcome history, a new mythology must be constructed; and every sacrifice must come at a cost. It’s time to let Wagner die. 

Each of these recordings begins with music and ends with the noise of cutting wax and scraping channels. All recordings done in one long through-recorded take; no digitally-composed loops or effects were used other than equalization, balance, compression, and light pitch shifting. This work was originally conceived as an installation, where the record is played continuously over the course of the exhibit, cutting and scratching the wax over hours and days until the work is unplayable in its original form. In the isolation of 2020-2021, this installation has been postponed indefinitely.