Gramophone (1-3/3)
In this work Bruszewski added three additional arms with needles to a traditional gramophone in order to transmit separate sounds from four different moments of the recording. Akin to Horizon, it is an instrument that generates its own philosophy. It is meant, by necessity, for the human ear, but its real addressee seems to be the being that perceives reality in a different way, unrestrained by the direction of the passage of time. It resembles ultrasonic music from The Sound-Sweep by J.G. Ballard, perceptible but not audible, compressed to such a degree that a three-hour opera by Wagner lasts just two minutes. The past, the present and the future merge here simultaneously.
What seems surprising from this perspective is that exactly four arms were used – after all, if the point were merely to reveal a new understanding of the temporal dimension involved in the reception of music, then three ‘moments’ would have been sufficient. What is suggested here is rather an attempt to imagine time as a spatial dimension, were each channel is separated with a distance that can be considered not only in time but also in space. Therefore, time crystallises and changes into a spatial composition where all points change synchronically and ‘revolve’. For each of the needles will move in an appropriate sequence through the same points on the surface of the record. Thus, what occurs alongside the ‘spatialisation of time’ is also the convolution or compression of time, which makes it impossible to follow the original composition.
[M. Libera, D. Muzyczuk, Microscopes for listening. Synchronisations and desynchronisations in Wojciech Bruszewski’s sound works in Wojciech Bruszewski. Across Realities, Warsaw 2014.]
