Friday, August 22, 2014

Rainier Lericolais | Quatuor à cordes n°3



Rainier Lericolais
Quatuor à cordes n°3 
Paris, France: Self-published, 2014
18 x 13 cm, audio postcard
Edition of 250 signed and numbered copies

Paris-based artist Rainier Lericolais published this two-minute-and-fifty-four-second audiowork on the occasion of his exhibition Fossils at galerie Frank Elbaz, which ran from April 26th to May 31st of this year.

The show examined tropes and technologies of the avant-garde past, celebrating obsolete technologies. The vinyl postcard represents two such fading everyday items. Despite the sales of vinyl records tripling in the past five years, the total still amounts to less than three percent of total music sales, making the term 'resurgence' a bit of an overstatement. Email, texting and twitter have all obviously replaced the short messages that postcards conveyed - apparently sales have dropped to below 1932 levels, which was not only during the Great Depression, but when the population was less than a third what it is now.

This lo-fi format, typically used for goofy promotional items, with its inevitable additional background noise, contains the work String Quartet #3, which is entirely built from string quartet sound samples.

Visit the artist's gallery page, here.



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