Description
Part 2 of the album trilogy Ich arbeite mit Frequenzen contains the same list of frequencies as part 1, but in the opposite direction, namely declining (abfallend). In addition to acoustic considerations, visual aspects also play a role in the composition of the list. The order of numbers in the typographic layout transforms the matter-of-factness of a technical programme into a kind of concrete poetry of numbers, and in the process also plays with high and pop-cultural references. 4400 hertz may be the excessive tenfold of the standard pitch of Western music, while 666 hertz is most definitely ‘the Number of the Beast’ not only in the Bible, but also in heavy metal.
But all this meta-information is itself reduced to noise by the sound stored on the CD. All this information is not a suitable key for interpreting that which is heard, simply because it is impossible to pick out any of the frequencies by ear. With pure sine tones this would be possible at least for people with perfect pitch, but here the distorted textures of the feedbacks blur any clear distinction. Sound here is always a surplus, an excess in relation to the contextual information that seeks to categorise and compartmentalise it. The fact that each album of the trilogy is released on a different label emphasises this: the sheer overload of the sonic phenomena is too much for one single communication channel.
This touches on a point which applies not only to every sonic object, but possibly to every object at large: in the final analysis, objects are material facts that are in no way dependent on human capacities, human intentions and interpretations. They exist independently of what humans think or feel about them. Whoever is prompted by noise works to categorise them as ‘inhuman noise’ is totally correct. Unlike music, noise confronts us with acoustic events not calibrated to human dimensions and human needs. Noise is indifferent to humans in a similar way as nature is. In light of the state the world is in precisely because of human development, this is almost a moral lesson: Not everything is about you, humans! Your laws need to be suspended. Aptly, when set next to each other, the two DVD cases of part 1 and 2 of Ich arbeite mit Frequenzen look a bit like the stone tablets with the ten commandments. But the ‘laws’ inscribed on them cancel themselves out because the frequency list of part 2 returns to the starting point of the list of part 1. We end at the zero point.