Master Sounds, cd release, 50 copies, Weimar, Germany, 2009
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Domestic sounds from the Master Houses, the first Bauhaus residences in Dessau, Germany, recorded by the Bauhaus Modulators (Grace Bayer and Thalia Raftopoulou), on the 30th of April 2009. These recordings were released in 50 copies in Weimar, Germany, in Compact Disc format, and include 15 samples featuring among others, the light switch from Paul Klee’ s atelier, Wassily Kandinsky’ s kitchen sink and a two minutes and 38 seconds of field recording above the ruins of László Moholy- Nagy’ s house.
Special thanks to Nikos Arvanitis for sound processing.
[The cd package comes in the stylized line of a prototype of a cover, a single carton sleeve that includes a round sticker in the dimensions of the compact disc. The compact disc can be pasted on the listener’ s wall, so that the wall can be the case for it.]
About the recordings
“Modernism has been read and looked at in detail but rarely heard. The historiographic interruption of the sound is due in part to technical difficulties. Sound inhabits its own time and dissipates quickly.” * However since aurality has been shifted through time since the development of technology, soundscape can be captured and transferred, becoming another medium to manipulate as any other material. Sound in domestic environment comes from everyday gestures on objects that are the result of living.
…the organism of a house evolves from the course of events that have predated it. In a house it is the functions of living, sleeping, bathing, cooking, eating that inevitably give the whole design of the house its form… the design is not there for its own sake, it arises alone from the nature of the building, from the function it should fulfil.
– Walter Gropius, 1930
The professors- "Masters" and people involved in the school of Bauhaus wanted their achievements and the quality of life that they struggled to design to become the everyday. Their ideals became a constant and succeeded to prevail as a new approach in production and ways of living. However, these original products played against their will and became luxurious objects-, inaccessible to broader public as well as their own houses did.
Entering the Houses of the professors of the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, we experience the household environment as a museum. The uniqueness of these houses comes from the notion that we have about the grandeur of their owners and therefore all the objects within them acquire the same flair. But as soon as one interacts with the environment, the door handles, the light switches, the windows etc. it is clear that this place still is a home and that the sounds within it are unchanged in time. The sonic routine of the everyday we do not usually notice, seems like it sets a neglected yet audible trace of the house. Repetition of gestures in household actions are likely to create sounds that generate a particular domestic song. The sounds here could embody the space- as envisioned by its creators- and the inhabitants. People tend to worship other human beings at a point that it becomes abstract and absurd. Such feelings arise while focusing on the artefacts produced by the first "modern" constructions. Footsteps, clicks, birds, water running down the drain, bits and pieces from the everyday life of these "grand painters" could possibly take up sacred characteristics and become isolated fragments to encounter and experience through the spectrum of worshiping to relating to or ponder upon. The soundtrack with the samples from the Master Houses could be a sonic proof of their standards of living.
Master Sounds: cd release that includes 15 samples from the four houses of Kandinsky, Feininger, Muche, Schlemmer and a two minute and 38 seconds field recording of the ruins of Moholy Nagy ‘s house. All these sounds, while they are being recorded, they are naturally amplified by the emptiness of the rooms. The room becomes the resonator or a sound box. The package of the cd can be fixed on a wall.
Produced in 50 copies from the Bauhaus Modulators, a collaboration between Grace Bayer and Thalia Raftopoulou, mastered by Nikos Arvanitis. Weimar, 2009.
*Khan, Douglas, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999)
