A Collection of Disappearing Sounds

Four years ago, I put on a pair of chunky red headphones and was immediately plunged into an entirely new soundworld. Suddenly, everything was buzzing, clicking and pulsing—yet there was no cable running from my headset, no bluetooth link to a nearby media player. I was in the center of Amsterdam for the city’s biennial Sonic Acts festival and had just volunteered to take part in one of Christina Kubisch’s electrical walks through the city. Since 2003, the German artist has been guiding groups of listeners on itineraries through cities from Lagos to Ekaterinburg, Shanghai to Quebec, wearing specially constructed headphones with built-in induction coils for transducing electromagnetic energy into audible sound. Wandering from the De Brakke Grond cultural center to Amsterdam Centraal, the main train station, I could hear the ever-present noise of the dense network of hi-tech security systems which crisscross the modern metropolis: intense throbs emanating from the Louis Vuitton shop’s perfume display, harsh grunts from shop doorways, squeals and growls from cars and cameras everywhere. In just one spot, deep in the Beursplein underground bike garage, far from the sliding doors and automated security systems near the entrance, I found a tiny little oasis of silence. But according to Kubisch, such electromechanical dead zones are now almost extinct—not just in big cities like the Dutch capital but even way out in the countryside.

Born in Bremen in the immediate postwar era, Kubisch first studied painting before attending conservatories in Zurich and Milan as a flutist and composer. Upon graduating, she took classes at the Milanese Technical Institute, where she first discovered the sounds produced by electromagnetic energy by accident, thanks to a small portable telephone amplifier. A pioneering sound artist, her work was included in some of the first major exhibitions dedicated to the new discipline, including “Sound – An Exhibition Of Sound Sculpture” at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1978 and “Für Augen und Ohren” (For Eyes and Ears) at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in 1980. Since then, she has performed and exhibited widely. Her new album, “Plus,” out this spring, is released by Edition DUR, a Berlin label operating out of Dussmann, a gigantic shop selling books, records, scores, and other culture products.