Berlin, Germany.On the cover of the their 2000 album “Qual­ity Con­trol” the mem­bers of LA HipHop Crew Juras­sic 5 can be seen sit­ting around a record player carved from the trunk of a tree. 11 years later Austrian-​based artist Bartholomäus Traubeck has cre­ated what Ryan Cameron, the sculp­tor of the before men­tioned wood sculp­ture, could only fan­ta­size about. Traubeck has man­aged to build a record player that can play actual slices of wood, or pol­ished wooden disks to be exact, instead of vinyl. A hacked PlaySta­tion PS eye cam­era that is attached to the ton­earm of the record player col­lects data about the den­sity, shape, thick­ness and growth of the annual rings of the tree and streams it to a com­puter. The col­lected para­me­ters deter­mine the vol­ume, pitch and length of the tone and the com­puter trans­lates them to the 88 tones of a piano key­board. Despite the sheer mass of infor­ma­tion that is being col­lected in the process, the piece’s sonic out­come is sur­pris­ingly reduced and almost min­i­mal­is­tic. With “Years” Traubeck man­aged to cre­ate a piece of art that is incred­i­bly appeal­ing on both a tech­ni­cal and an aes­thetic level, as well as with regard to con­tent. “Years” not only col­lects the data that com­prises the infor­ma­tion of the whole life of a (for­merly) liv­ing being, it also makes us won­der what exactly it is that shapes said liv­ing being, that makes it grow in a cer­tain way and that thanks to Traubeck now also sounds a cer­tain way. The artist thusly man­ages to tran­scend the the form of the wooden disk and makes the expe­ri­ence uni­ver­sally applic­a­ble to all liv­ing beings. Dur­ing his last visit to Berlin Bartholomäus Traubeck was kind enough to answer a cou­ple of ques­tions about his stun­ning work for Curbs and Stoops.

C&S:Poten­tially you could have syn­chro­nized any instru­ment or any sound with the data that is being col­lected by the cam­era. Why did you decided to use the piano harmony?

BT: Because I felt that the piano is an instru­ment with a very long tra­di­tion, so we are really used to its sound. With its 88 keys it also has a very wide range of tonal­ity. I prob­a­bly saw it as the arche­typ­i­cal instru­ment for play­ing some­thing like a ‘composition’.

C&S: Were you sur­prised when you first heard the sounds that the machine produces?

BT: Well yes, because at first the machine was using only untuned sine waves which pro­duced rhyth­mic but indis­tin­guish­able pat­terns, but as soon as the tran­si­tion to tuned piano sounds was made it sounded aston­ish­ingly good.

C&S: One of your “Years”-tracks was also played as part of a Cana­dian radio pro­gram. Did you feel that the track worked well as just a piece of music or does it still require the aes­thetic visual part that the record player provides?

BT: I thought that it wouldn’t work at all in a radio envi­ron­ment, but the sta­tion wanted to do the fea­ture and the response from the lis­ten­ers was actu­ally very pos­i­tive. A label even approached me after­wards. I think I have changed my mind about it now and there will be an audio-​only release soon. But either way, visual or not, the story of how the music was gen­er­ated is impor­tant. It’s half the expe­ri­ence. The visual part is actu­ally just explain­ing and stress­ing the idea, but it also works if you just tell the story along­side the music.

C&S: In “Years” nature and tech­nol­ogy can be wit­nessed func­tion­ing as a very har­mo­nious unity, as a com­bi­na­tion that seems almost nat­ural in itself. Does the human ele­ment still play a part in this or can “Years” do with­out it?

BT: So far machines are still cre­ated by humans, “Years” as well. The fact that no human is involved in the actual com­po­si­tion does not mean that the human ele­ment is out of the pic­ture. Build­ing a machine can be a very intu­itive and artis­tic process.

[Traubeck later jok­ingly men­tioned the Hashimoto Exper­i­ment as an inspi­ra­tion for his artwork.]

C&S: More and more record labels that still pro­duce vinyl records com­bine their phys­i­cal releases with MP3 down­load codes. Do you think that vinyl records still have a rai­son d’être or have they been reduced to mere fetish objects?

BT: Vinyl records are the per­fect fetish object in terms of audio stor­age media. They are big, yet still handy and have lots of space for cover art. But maybe they are only still out there to remind us that the dig­i­tal medium is still not flaw­less and that espe­cially the way we use dig­i­tal for­mats very heav­ily incor­po­rates loss of infor­ma­tion. Some­times it feels as if not the actual qual­ity of ana­log media was supe­rior to dig­i­tal but the mode of access. I can actu­ally look at a film-​negative and get infor­ma­tion out of it. A vinyl record can be lis­tened to with a sewing nee­dle. This obvi­ously does not apply to all ana­log stor­age media, for exam­ple mag­netic tape, but they make us feel less removed from tech­nol­ogy than, say a mp3 file. Ana­log media seem to be closer to a nat­ural state, and in a way they are because they are not as evolved as dig­i­tal media. Maybe in some close or dis­tant future our nat­ural state will be altered so far that we can embrace dig­i­tal and imma­te­r­ial media in a way in which we love and fetishize vinyl now.

C&S: Is a unique wooden disk that trans­ports a sonic ver­sion of the col­lected data of a whole life of a liv­ing being the cul­mi­na­tion of this development?

BT: Def­i­nitely not. There are and will be more elab­o­rate ways and works to high­light this devel­op­ment. But yes, in some way it can be seen as some kind of long­ing to be con­nected to a ‘nat­ural’ state.

C&S: Thank you for the interview.