Blank Out

(12', ) 'RESTLESS
to blank out, blinding out and fading down, simultaneously meaning to physically disrupt or even delete. Here, an independent disappearance into invisibility or inaudibility, as well as a deliberate act to interrupt, or even entirely eliminate, haptic and acoustic tangibility, are placed side by side. They describe a dynamic limbo between states of being and non-being.This is why we are speaking of silence, even when there’s sound, of emptiness, even when space is created.
What is blank, what is the absence of content or material? What is a rest? Something that remains, exists, but somehow isn’t worth mentioning in terms of its existence and audibility – background, noise, static?

A record player on a pedestal in the space,
a tone arm lifting up.
The needle comes down – a pop and click.
Touch.
A swirling, vortex-shaped track from edge to center.
A description of beginning and end.
While the lead-out groove’s function is to keep the needle from crossing the label at the center of the disc, we are also well familiar with the noise that calls on us, maybe causes us to jump up, to flip the record.
Listening to 2 x 400 x 1.8 second samples of pure functionality. The sound is restless, the 12” record played on the turntable like static, rain, driving on tarmac, fire in your ears.
A cylindrical, glossy, black sculpture, a block of vinyl, confronts a picture on the wall – square, yellow, reduced, abstract. Static, rain, driving on tarmac, fire.
Every repetition contains selection, every selection contains difference.
The sound in your ears is densifying. Static, rain, driving on tarmac, fire.

Rest, material, medium: the boundaries seem fluid. The elements in the room draw transformational processes from functionality towards autonomy, towards the becoming of form and object, towards representation. A before and after become visible. If you will, this state, that the term blank out describes as deleting and vanishing into insignificance or invisibility, becomes a possibility for manifestation. Because even nothingness is in a state of being – and the permeability of disappearance holds the potential to break with this state of being altogether.
The yellow square on the wall, the back of a record box, withholds what seems to be the secret of the cover. It’s a surface of pure color, only disrupted by an old price tag, otherwise empty, blank.

Text : Sandra Hampe
translated by Henrik Nieratschker

Transparencies was kindly supported by Senator für Kultur der Freien Hansestadt Bremen.'[discogs]