In the womb, sound rules. It is art experienced pre-light. We emerge with a bond to it that places (depending on your parents) Mozart or Iggy Pop, or for that matter a heartbeat or car horn, miles ahead of the paintings and sculptures that will soon challenge it for our attention. Perhaps this accounts for the strong emotional response it generates within us. Even an unaccompanied drum can stir us to action. The body itself, of course, also generates sound. Or low-frequency noise. An electrochemical pulse and a beat. The sound composer John Cage referred to this as “non-intentional” audio. Perhaps these non-intentional and ambient sounds even inspired the first pre-visual works of art in the form of early rhythm (a tapping foot and eventually the drum as synthetic heartbeat). But does flesh record? Which is to ask: Do our bodies compose and capture sound? Paint and document? Film and re-film? And if so, is the body then also the first plastic medium?

Flesh Records, A limited Edition CD/Audio Exhibition is comprised of fifteen tracks from a new generation of artists excited by the intimacy of sound and its possibilities as a plastic art. The works, many of which were composed specifically for this project, range in shape and tone from Romantic to Pop to Cinematic and Sculptural/Body based. What they have in common is perhaps the idea that sound-art, with its lack of visual stimuli, connects us to an earlier time, both personally and collectively, when the body intuitively acted as artist, muse and medium.

ARTISTS: Rita Ackermann, Richard Aldrich, Mike Bouchet, Bozidar Brazda, Olaf Breuning, C.R.E.E.,P, Pia Dehne & Mark O, Sara Glaxia, K8 Hardy, Johannes Atli Hinriksson, Marie-Eve Jetzer, Paul-Aymar Mourgue D’Algue, Anna Parkina, Aida Ruilova & Nancy Garcia, Taner Tumkaya