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 GUNTHER
SCHROTH
Barcode Music
2001
Archegon
63:12
The soundtrack to this stinking start to the twenty-first century is
electronic, random and remote. It is the sound of mobile phones endlessly
repeating phrases of Bach and snatches of Eminem, the click of your hard-drive
as you download yet something else you neither want or need, the beep
of beepers, the wail of car alarms, the ding-dong-ding of automated public
address systems, the chattering white static of faxes and modems transmitting
blindly, compulsively. Gunther Schroth's cunning exploitation of
the aural possibilities afforded by barcode scanners is entirely apposite
in the context of a terminally sick society obsessed by throwaway consumerism
and communication for the sake of communication. The codes in question
ping and burr happily away, each different, each with some unintelligible
something new to say. From beans to bread to beer to brassieres, from
sanitary towels to salt cellars to sequins to sausages, from dog food
to diapers to daffodils to dirty magazines. And so it goes on, and you
die, then you rot in the ground and this faceless, arbitrary music will
have been the soundtrack to your life, the whole as instantly forgettable
as its constituent parts. Like that life, this album is at its best when
at it's least ambitious - the droning, buzzing 'EAN 13' sequence, for
instance. Gunther Schroth's Barcode Music strikes me as a necessary
progression to the type of stuff his fellow countryman Peter Frohmader
was putting out in the eighties and nineties. Very Rehberg and Bauer in
both concept and execution - other reference points being EAR's Data
Rape and the Vox Insecta recordings of Q.R Ghazala - the only
possible reason why Mego/Staalplaat haven't already signed Schroth up
is that they haven't heard this yet. A pity, because it deserves a wider
audience than it's currently going to get.
STEWART GOTT - 29 October 2001
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