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It’s pretty hard to describe the highly conceptual work of German sound artist and composer Christina Kubisch —part of its allure is the air of mystery that surrounds it. But one thing she’s long demonstrated is her deep interest in the everyday sounds around us, the ones we usually take for granted. A recording like Twelve Signals (Semishigure, 2003), which chronicles 52 minutes in the life of a sound installation she put up in a Berlin church back in 1999, manages to stand on its own, in a minimalist sort of way, though it obviously pales when compared to the actual installation. She found a number of electrical bells from the end of the 19th century that were used in a mine in St. Ingbert, Germany, to tell workers, through a dozen different patterns and tones, about the movements of an underground lift. The bells were no longer functional, so she sampled them being struck with small hammers and installed speakers in front of each bell, which played the various patterns. They then played all 12 signals once during a 52-minute span to create overlapping patterns. Even more wonderfully serendipitous is the ringing of external church bells halfway through the piece, a kind of sonorous but distant sound glow that murmurs in the distance while the much smaller, pinging electrical bells—kind of the like hallway bells you used to find in a high school—sound in the foreground.
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