georg klein : : The yellow sound

100 years ago, in 1912, Wassily Kandinsky published in the almanac "The Blue Rider" a text which seems to be a manifest on founding sound art - at least a foreshadowing of sound art. His writing "Über Bühnenkomposition" (On stage composition) is a theoretical preface on a planned stage piece called "Der gelbe Klang" (The yellow sound) and in this text he postulated a new connection between the arts, an "inner" connection of "sound, color, words" and movement. His piece was never realised in his lifetime.

The installation Der gelbe Klang² (The yellow sound²) as a homage to Kandinsky takes his conceptual ideas and makes a transfer into a contemporary sound art piece. Georg Klein often works in his sound art installations with a certain color which defines togehter with a basic sound a fundamental atmosphere of a specific site, preparing a field in which more material - sounds, words, video - can appear.
In the installation in the royal park of Karlsruhe there are two pure, yellow sounds, which come out of two places and mix in the space between. These places are 2 entrances of a basement garage under the park, which strangely contrast with the baroque castle. The entrance stairs seem to lead into a dark nothing. The basic sound material was derived from a site-specific acoustic research and transformed the concrete sounds into abstract sounds. Together with "yellow noise" and a sentence out of Kandinsky's text (spoken by Sergej Newsky in russian and german) this material is worked out in two 6-channel compositions building an acoustic space. Visually the two stairways are colored by yellow light and a special Kandinsky-yellow created by FEMA as an extract of his picture "Improvisation 10" from 1910. "Sound, color, words" come here together in a site-specific way, perceptive by movements in-between the two spaces.

For the TONSPUR gallery in a passage way of the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna the installation was adapted in a site-specific way, condensed to a 8-channel sound installation and extended by a poster series: on a row of seven yellow posters 4 lines out of Kandinsky's text can be read during the russian-german voice and the yellow noise are sounding Der gelbe Klang^TS (The yellow sound^TS).