de—COMPOSED

Sound as a mark to place ephemeral splinters in the surroundings — Sound as a gesture to draw with invisible lines and pervasions (forms) — Sound as a color to paint environments with transparent atmospheres — Sound as a volume to determine or fill space in time.

de—COMPOSED — A new artist’s book by Berlin-based sound artist Stefan Roigk. The catalog documents acousmatic compositions, sound installations, musical graphics and text-sound compositions of the years 2005 to 2023 on 144 pages and 2 Audio-CDs.

A complex assemblage, composed of documentation photos, texts and drawings, becomes an interlocking whole in its dynamic flows and fields and animates the paper as a vibrantly structured visual composition. A piece of music for the eyes, in which the boundaries between documentation, draft and work become blurred in a surreal mesh of the concrete and fictional. Here, the reader generates their own individual temporal axis based on their speed of observation and focus on the optical elements, thus becoming a mixing board for a composition realized as a catalogue.

Three text pieces give a deeper insight into Roigk’s understanding of sound as material and the translation of sound events into other media.
As an equivalent to the visual approach of the catalog and in order to adequately convey the sonic dimension of the artistic work, (sound) fragments of all the works covered in the catalog were transferred into a dynamic collage-like arrangement with Roigk’s typical aesthetics and are included with the catalog as an independent listening experience in the form of two audio CDs.

The catalog is published in the format 21 x 26 cm with gatefold softcover and includes 180 color illustrations on a total of 144 pages. Besides the catalog itself, the publication contains 2 Audio CDs with 33 tracks and a total playing time of 141 minutes, 2 A5 postcards and a bandcamp download code to enjoy the release also digitally.

STEFAN ROIGK (* 1974) is a sound artist based in Berlin. He studied fine art with a focus on sound art in Hannover under Professor Ulrich Eller.

In his work, Roigk pursues the intermedial interweaving of sound collage, installation, musical graphics and text-sound composition. The resulting works approach sound as a field for artistic and aesthetic research, taking it as both their departure point and central medium. Roigk’s artistic focus lies on the dynamic staging of context-related fragments of everyday existence, which he imbues, in the sense of visual music, with an extraordinarily developed, visually poetic formal language. In realizing these aims, Roigk uses compositional and deconstructivist techniques of collage and assemblage for the development of stage-like spatial compositions with an implicit underlying narrative sense, in which the diverse media blend together like the instruments of an orchestra. In his work, Roigk reflects on his own living and production conditions, while investigating the political potential of aurality and tracing the subjective construction of reality.

For more information, see www.stefan-roigk.com.