“but there was something like abandon in the air there was something like the feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air there was a kind of madness to it.”
Robert Ashley, Private Parts

“Atmospheric Disturbances” by Armin Lorenz Gerold consists of an audio play and installation, specifically conceived for the gallery space and its urban surrounding. The narration revolves around two protagonists and their constellation – strung together perhaps as siblings, as accomplices or per chance. The ambient sound corrupts the pure logic of speech, allowing for acoustic images, which shape the characters to slowly emerge in front of a landscape-evoking backdrop.

Gerold’s immersive works of sound and voices consciously move between fore- and background. Like in the story, giving a close account of the protagonists’ journeys of encounters in urban spaces and nature the visitors depart on their own venture, as the hazy playback transcends the gallery into a place of almost immaterial experience.

Experimental composer Robert Ashley once spoke about involuntary speech and the idea of composing music like „automatic writing“ deriving from mental unconsciousness. He describes the idea of a new form of musical storytelling as an opera of some kind. Similar to Gerold’s work the words are not necessarily the primary source of meaning, but together with sounds, their sensuality and tonality have a presence, which creates a corporeal involvement.„Every word was once an animal“(1) someone said a long time ago - denying the liberal humanist separation of mind/body or man/animal and the separation between those who claim all is language or all is material. The piece itself accommodates many levels of listening attention, without enforcing one in particular. Like those different modes, the narration unfolds through contrasting contents.

The renditions of localities present in the actual play, for example, are mostly described through surfaces -like glass and metal- of modern architecture. Those emphasize the dimension of abstraction inherent to the play. It is only occasionally that this logic is interrupted by passages that talk about meteorological phenomena or historical events that convey tensions. “Atmospheric Disturbances” therefore not only allows for narrative stratification but also refers to the catchword “mood“ that frequented the political context in 2018.

The three posters on the back wall of the gallery space each portray different traces or outlines of glass figures, announcing the audio play with language translated to Albanian, Serbian and English. In the tradition of film posters, relying on translating titles and narratives to differnt national contexts, the prints work as both an actual and fictional annoucement for something yet to come. As such, the work is also a result of reflecting on topics such as communication, demarcation, or disturbances- transcending the subjective imagination to raise consciousness of the implicit inscriptions that are part of information that we receive daily.

Curated by Maurin Dietrich & Cathrin Mayer

(1) Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courtesy of the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina