Andrzej Steinbach

Artist Andrzej Steinbach's debut album includes two pieces of music, »Wartehalle« and »Behörde«, which he recorded in mono at the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren in early 2024.

Steinbach converted an object from his collection into an instrument. A contact microphone was attached to the metal door frame, which reproduces the natural vibrations of the frame via an amplifier and a sound transducer in a feedback loop. Using an intermediate mixer, Steinbach was able to control these charges directly and play the door frame in a kind of ›free industrial jazz‹. The two experimental tracks were created in situ, and Waltraud Blischke describes their sonic character as follows: »What begins on vinyl with the ringing of bells from outside and a vibrating crescendo through oscillations inside, soon diffuses as feedback and transforms standing waves into the sound of foghorns. (...) A kind of rudimentary language rises over various vocal ranges, seems threatening over distances, sometimes moody like a soaked double bass, lingers in rhythmic, electrostatic crackling, rattles like a relic of early industrial machinery with drums in its bowels«.

And so »Portal« – like all of Steinbach's work – shakes up the fixed definitions and certainties of our thoroughly structured everyday lives.