After more than ten years of making music with turntables, tapes and loops the swiss based musician, artist, performer and architect Christoph Hess started the project Strotter Inst. in 1998, to concentrate just on the manipulation of turntables, without using any records or sounds created by someone or something else.
The anachronistic machineries have dual roles as objects and as instruments. The first live impact is as installations, then the sounds start to grab the listeners’ attention. The audial level surpasses the visual one. Therefore, the optical comprehension of how the sound is generated, plays an important role. Hardly using sounds from LP’s – if so, they are cut or scotched – the main source of the sound are the specially prepared turntable arms (i.e. with sewing needles or strings instead of the diamond or the extended use of rubber bands). The treatment involves the unclean nature of the sounds as part of the music. Besides the work as a musician, Strotter Inst. is creating sound objects and installations out of the mentioned turntables. The abbreviation “Inst.” can both mean “instrument” or “installation”.
The objects and installations are putting the focal point on the static presence of the turntables. Not playing them, but their own movement and their kind of operating, define the object.
Live, Strotter Inst. is generating dense sound- and rhythm structures. The music ranges from a low-fi rumble changing into concrete clicks and scrapes, followed by epic drones and multilayered broken beats to fall back into tricky bass-meditations. In spite, or probably because of the analogue creation, the structures produce a contemporary and accurate atmosphere in space and time. Strotter Inst. prefers to play in the middle of the audience.
Presented in partnership with Les Urbaines Art Festival, Lausanne
