bradley leonard
Tonbandstimmen (2026)
Performed at MINOR SIGNALS // BIG GARAGE, galerie5020 in Salzburg, at the Open Studio of the Internationale Sommerakademie Salzburg, and at the 12-Hour Performance Project, Vilnius Academy of Arts
Tonbandstimmen is a serial performance on the relationship between live labor and its recording, set within the political economy of sound. Each performance is composed in real time from a radio, a turntable playing rights-free records, and a synthesizer, mixed live and recorded onto a single blank cassette. Every performance produces exactly one tape, and every tape is one edition: the work does not circulate as a reproducible recording, but as the physical residue of a specific span of labor, carried out in front of an audience.
The cassette is the format that once turned every listener into a potential copyist, and it still carries that suspicion. Blank tapes are levied in advance, on the assumption that they will be filled with the work of others. Tonbandstimmen fills the tape with nothing owed to anyone. The only labor it holds is the performer’s own, spent in the room and unrepeatable. If, for Jacques Attali, recording is the moment music became repetition, a stockpile of interchangeable commodities, the serial performance moves in the other direction: music as composition, an act that exists only while it is being carried out.
The title borrows from the practice of listening for voices in the static of magnetic tape. Here the voices are not ghosts but traces of work: the hand on the dial, the needle set down, the decision to let a passage run. In doing so, Tonbandstimmen turns the edition from a copy into a document, and moves the listener’s attention from the product to the labor that made it.
No recording of the performances exists outside the editions.
Documentation: Gaia Tovaglia, Helena Kalleitner, Mily Meyer