Western Recording

Mathias Poledna’s film installation shows a recording session in the legendary Studio 3 at United Western Recorders, a studio that has remained largely unchanged since the early 1960s because of its special sound. From the multiple referential fields alluded to by this setting, as well as the inherent tension between its current function and historical significance, Poledna creates a hybrid historical constellation that combines a reinterpretation of the 1969 song “City Life” along with the appearance, the habitus, and the performance of the musicians. The studio space into which Western Recording takes us is in the truest sense of the word split, crossed by a multiplicity of contrary temporary coordinates, and as a media apparatus divided into a live and a control area. Through the conditions for the play of image and sound that result from this splitting, Poledna achieves a complex problematization of filmic documentation or the audiovisual construction and reconstruction of history. Poledna’s occupation with the aesthetic and media conditions of historical perception is continued in a series of photographs. Seven black and white images show the two studios where the vocal and orchestra tracks to “Western Recording” were recorded. They thus underscore the constructed character of the audiovisual space-time structure of the film and link its examination of historical orientation to the medium of photography. 1960s design and vintage recording devices stand alongside the modern, anonymous studio furnishings of the present. What in terms of content seems like a blatant historical opposition is however homogenized by Poledna by way of the unified format, the shared framing, and especially the identical, new factual style of the photographic black and white images. Documentary neutrality and objectivity, as they become graspable here as an aethetic specific of photography, have long themselves become part of intellectual, style, and art history. They are part of the contradictory nature of media historicity, the elements of which continually reflect one another in “Western Recording.”