Gasworks | Gerald Fiebig feat. EMERGE & Christian Z. Müller by Gruenrekorder

„Gasworks“ by sonic artist Gerald Fiebig collects his sound installations, radiophonic compositions, and live performances relating to the former gasworks in Augsburg-Oberhausen. They were created between 2010 and 2016, some in collaboration with colleagues EMERGE and Christian Z. Müller. Among the compositional materials of the album are processed recordings of the sounds of gas and industrial machinery, stories told by a former gasworks employee, and live improvisations in the echo chamber of the large gas tank.

Liner notes by Gerald Fiebig:

Cities phosphorescent
on the riverbank, industry’s
glowing piles waiting
beneath the smoke trails
W.G. Sebald, After Nature

The former gasworks in Augsburg-Oberhausen (not to be confused with the better-known Gasometer in the city of Oberhausen in the Ruhr area) have been a subject of my artistic practice for more than a decade. This album collects all the works related to the gasworks except a site-specific installation version of Echoes of Industry that did not lend itself to documentation as a recording.
Opened in 1915, the gasworks are a testimony to the spirit of what one could call the ‚heroic‘ age of industrialisation. The architecture of the ovens and machine halls features stylistic quotes from the façade of Augsburg’s renaissance city hall as well as from cathedrals. Technological progress is presented as both raison d’état and religion. This stands in stark contrast to the extremely hard, dangerous and – for a very long time – poorly paid working conditions described by long-time gasworks employee Johann Artner in Nach der Industrie / After Industry. From our contemporary viewpoint, informed by climate change and the impending end of fossil resources, the optimism expressed in the beautiful architecture of the gasworks also appears less than justified for ecological reasons: until 1968, the gasworks actually produced gas by burning coal in large ovens. They then continued to operate as a distributing station for fossil gas from transcontinental pipelines into the local network. Operations ceased in 2001.
After almost two decades of merely intermittent use for festivals and other events, 2019 saw the re-opening of the gasworks area as an arts centre featuring a theatre as well as artists‘ studios, rehearsal rooms, and office spaces for creative businesses. This seems to imply that it has now entered the ‚post-industrial‘ age where clean, almost immaterial computer screens have replaced the factory floors once so dirty and dangerous.
In fact, there is no such thing as a ‚post-industrial‘ age, just globalised capitalism increasingly outsourcing the dirty and dangerous work (manufacturing the microprocessors for the ‚post-industrial‘ devices, for example) to poorer countries. And of course industrial manufacturing still does form an important part of economies of the global North, even if the leading role in ideological narratives of growth and prosperity has been taken over by the ‚post-industrial‘ businesses.
Both post-industrial, which is partly based on processed sounds of a metal tool factory quite close to the gasworks, and Echoes of Industry can be heard as reminders of these ambivalences. Echoes of Industry brings the space of the gasworks into contact with the sounds of textile machines. This is a reference to the fact that the decline of the gasworks as an industrial site paralleled that of Augsburg’s once-thriving textile industry. It also alludes to the role of the textile industry as one of the most prominent examples for the exploitative use of cheap offshore labour.

======================================
Mre Information: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=17005
Order here: http://shop.gruenrekorder.de/?full#Gruen_179