Clint Williamson on Vadim Fainberg's Timbre

http://cargocollective.com/vadimfainberg#2366851/Timbre

The Sound of the Print

The record is not dead. Within the last decade, the resurgence of vinyl record sales exists as an anomaly within the music industry, especially considering that sales of both compact discs and digital files have severely declined. The rise of free, easily-accessible digital media has shifted the fiscal market for sound artists; however, .an opposition to these digital files has arisen and created a demand for a tangible product, something which one can experience physically, immediately, and intimately. Similarly, the demand for an auditory live experience has increased and the presentation of audio works (along with vinyl record sales) has become how the vast majority of sound artists remain financially stable. In his Timbre series of record prints, Fainberg changes the notion of vinyl as the only source for a record. Using wood block prints, Fainberg layers a print multiple times, heavily coating the paper in thick layers of ink in order to emphasize the physicality of the work by building up textures. While heavily layering ink and paint upon a work is not a new idea (French artists working post World-War II come to mind), what Fainberg does with this print once finished is where his ideation becomes entirely new. Cutting 12” circles out of these thick layered prints, Fainberg essentially presses records—records which do not possess grooves to encode the sound. All of the sound of Fainberg’s print records comes from the immediate connection between the rotating needle on the record player, the processing (digital or analog) run through the output, and the settings on the output device (in the case of his 12/06/11 performance, two Peavey and two Crate speakers). Upon playing the record, Fainberg can place the 12” print back into the larger print he cut it from; returning the work to its jacket, a work of art typically associated with the gallery space and not the milk-crate record bin.

With this work, Fainberg woks within the legacy of experimental audio producers such as John Cage, Brian Eno, and Thurston Moore—pushing the boundaries of their instrument (Fainberg’s record player in this instance) in order to explore new territory of sound and sound production. Fainberg subverts the notion that a record contains the past, merely traces left of a previous event; the print record has no audio history, merely a visual history which he crafts by layering the ink upon the canvas. These works operate as transitory medium in which the visual and textural translates into the auditory. In other words, the visual constructs the audio experience via its physical translation into a sound. Because this process stands as such a novel conception, Fainberg has not fully explored what the experience of this translation can mean (i.e. the actual sounds produced by the print record). If the audio actually emitting from the process were crafted into particular pieces or compositions, Fainberg’s work would no longer be just a conceptual success; however, as of now, the print records produce fairly similar, unremarkable drones which seem almost flat. Ironic considering the texture of the record produces the sound. Fainberg has created a series of works which manage to reappropriate the record for an entirely different means while simultaneously annotating and assimilating it with a high-art, visual production. Fainberg, very early in the process, further proves that the record is not dead.