Surface Spoils: Concrete Music from Europe

During the course of a six-week car trip through Europe in summer 1997, I decided to try the same experiment that yielded Songs of the Islands: Concrete Museum from New York and collect any discarded audio tape I found on the ground. New York is a particularly dirty city, and I wasn't sure I would be able to find any tape in Europe; perhaps streets got cleaned up more quickly there?

As it turned out, I found tape in every one of the ten countries I visited, in twelve different cities. I collected, cleaned and subsequently spliced together the pieces of tape in the order and lengths in which I found them so I could digitize them. For the resulting wall installation, each original piece of loose tape is displayed under a plastic dome, with a base made from section of a European map corresponding to the city where that tape fragment was found. The bubbles containing the tape are arranged on the wall with the geographic relationships the locations actually have to one another.

I found bits of Kurdish-Turkish 80s pop music on the streets of Berlin, Croatian pop music in Italy, Czech punk rock in Prague, a Mozart horn concerto in Budapest, thrash-rock in Zagreb, house music in Kassel, Vangelis in Hamburg, soul music in Helsinki, and some of Neil Young’s “Southern Man” in Stockholm. Songs were sung in many languages but not necessarily in the dominant language of the country where I found it. Only four of the twelve songs that had vocals were in English.