Florian Hecker / Mark Leckey – Sound Voice Chimera [LP]

"In 2010, acclaimed German sound experimentalist Florian Hecker and multidisciplinary artist Mark Leckey came together for the first time. Their combined Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera—a mutant configuration of two geneti- cally discrete solo works—was originally presented as part of a two-day performance event at the Tate Modern called Push and Pull, and arrives as PAN’s inaugural offering of 2015. Both artists, as the art historian Alex Kitnick notes in his text accompanying the release, have a demonstrated interest in sound and its material effects; Hecker’s acute, algorithmic computer music is noted for impacting the very molecular infrastructure of its listeners, while Leckey’s work across performance, sculpture, and installation takes up transcendence and the occupation (or animation) of new bodies and modes of being.

In Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera, Hecker decomposes, modulates, and re-synthesizes the vocal track from Leckey’s 2010 performance piece “GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction” (for which Leckey intoned the inner monologue of a black Samsung fridge) and his own “3 Channel Chronics” installation from that same year, where distinct sounds from three speakers telescoping down from the ceiling were combined and altered by visitors’ movements. The result- ing work—like that three-headed beast of Greek mythology—is a multivalent, tri-part hybrid in which heavily distorted fragments of Leckey’s narrative intersperse Hecker’s synthetic textures and fidgety tonal patterns. On the PAN release itself, channel 1 from Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera corresponds with side A and channel 2 with side B; channel 3 is available as a monophonic mp3 download."

PAN, 2015