The practice of sampling other artists surely isn’t anything new in modern music. Norbert Möslang, however, has a novel approach, bending quite notably both the ideas of sampling and the type or artist whose work is typically mined. Möslang, formerly of the duo Voice Crack, specializes in the transformation of light into sound, and on header_change, he manipulates video stills from the work of Swiss compatriot and visual artist Silvie Defraoui, creating clouds of electric haze from light and darkness in an original brand of musical photosynthesis.
The subtle shudder of a stilled video image is a prime sound source for Möslang, with rapid buzzing undulations a near-constant underpinning of the disc’s tracks. Listening to header_change tends to be an enveloping experience, with blankets of electric vibrations cascading forth in gentle ebbs and flows. While there exist changes in the pitch and character of the sounds, Möslang’s approach on each of the disc’s tracks is largely the same. The electronic fog of each track is manipulated to shift the tone of the piece, both in subtle and more apparent ways. At times, Möslang’s transitions are like those of a sunrise, with change happening so slowly that only the wholesale transformation is noticed, but at others, the tempo of the sound’s wavering is altered quite sharply, or the differing patterns of undulation are pulled into phase, a multitude of voices becoming one. Möslang stretches the stills’ data to its limit, and what one might expect to be a claustrophobic experience feels surprisingly expansive.
The term “glitch” has quite a loaded connotation in contemporary discussion of electronic music, but it remains relevant to Möslang’s technique here, which can sound like an army of skipping cd players set loose on the listener’s ears. The concept of a soundtrack without a film is one often conjured in music reviews, and onheader_change, Norbert Möslang puts a microscopic twist on the idea, making a soundtrack frame by frame.
