Hainbach and the Sound of Destruction

Abstract

Hainbach is the stage name of the Berlin-based composer, lyricist, and live musician, Stefan Paul Goetsch, who is perhaps best known from his YouTube channel of the same name. Descriptions and classifications of Hainbach’s music invariably include references to the musician’s innovative and ‘experimental’ approach to music production and highlight his use of magnetic tape and obsolete tone generators, such as those used by the early proponents of electronic-based music. This article examines three of Hainbach’s recent electronic works: Tagwerk (2022), Landfill Totems (2019), and Destruction Loops (2019–2021), framing them as palimpsests of archived destruction that recall such wide-ranging works as the magnetic tape experiments of Alvin Lucier, the auto-destructive impulse and social engagement of German-born artist and activist Gustav Metzger, or even the ‘erasures’ of Robert Rauschenberg. In this article, I reveal the complex, seemingly contradictory, palimpsestuous structure of Hainbach’s works, where creation meets destruction, collage and décollage are co-planar, and the gestures of ‘play’—that creative act with destruction at its horizon—are ever present. Through play, Hainbach explores the creative potential of both sound and instrument, surveys their affordances, and courts creativity at the unpredictable intersection of serendipity and failure.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Subscriber count as of March 2023. Live performances listed for September–October 2022: 9 September, Hertogenbosch; 10 September, Utrecht; 17 September, Munich; 30 September, Bochum Modus Festival; 6 October, Izmir digitZmir; 8 October, Berlin Vintage Computer Festival; 20 October, Halle Impuls; 27 October, Frankfurt (Hainbach 2022b). Hainbach has recorded on the following labels: Opal Tapes, Seil Records, Spring Break Tapes, Limited Interest, and Marionette (Hainbach n.d.a); Fundamental in collaboration with SonicLab; Landfill Totems with Spitfire Audio; Motors, Wires, Gong Amp, Dials, and Noises with AudioThing.

2 See also Turner (2021).

3 For a definition of electroacoustic music, see for example Holmes (2002, 7).

4 Hainbach’s ‘merch’ even includes a ‘Half-Speed’ cap (Hainbach n.d.b).

5 ‘Some units break so beautifully that their swan song is just amazing because it unlocks hidden layers of distortion that sing with overtones’ (McKinnon 2019).

6 It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive overview of the history of the aesthetic of failure and destruction. See for example Stuart (2003) and Cascone (2017). See also Fisher (1974).

7 Feedback was initially ‘a nuisance in sound reinforcement and recording, but the sonic possibilities began to reveal themselves to musicians’ (Warner 2019, 84).

8 Credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, the band was actually Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm (Waksman 2003, 109).

9 For a commentary on the distinction between hi-fi and lo-fi aesthetic, see for example Newton (2016). In particular, the lo-fi aesthetic renders medium audible: ‘The history of the development of different audio formats from wax to vinyl to tape to CD, indeed, seems itself to be driven by a single-minded, stubborn desire to render the communications system or medium entirely transparent (or inaudible, rather) and to eradicate entirely any interference coming from the system or the medium itself we can instead focus solely on the pure audio content of our choice’ (Hainge 2007, 28).

10 Similarly, ‘Madonna’s 2003 release “American Life”, produced by Mirwais Ahmadzai, contains backing tracks of 78rpm record noise’ (Bates 2004, 289).

11 ‘Oval made a name for itself by its use of damaged technologies, namely, the use of deliberately marked and disfigured CDs that when played created percussive clips and pops’ (Ashline 2002, 88–89).

12 Christian Marclay used similar methods: ‘To create a rhythm I would […] break things. … Then I would use skipping records to record loops on the cassette recorder and those became the rhythms for the band’ (Marclay and Kahn 2003, 20).

13 Metzger’s own influences can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century and the surrealist, Dadaist and futurist movements. In 1922, Man Ray assembled his artwork Object to be Destroyed (see Mileaf 2004, 5).

14 ‘I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear then are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as the demonstration of a physical fact but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have’ (A Channel 2017).

15 According to vintagesynth.com, ‘This is possibly one of the most unreliable synths when found on the used market! Models almost always have failed components in either the monosynth or polysynth stages. Most frequently encountered are failures of one or both DCOs, or the entire polysynth stage in of itself. Purchase of a DS-2 can be a VERY risky proposition!’ (Vintage Synth Explorer n.d.).

16 Failure can be approached in numerous ways, but here failure is viewed broadly as an irrevocable disruption of intention: ‘that moment of breakage between the reality of the present and the anticipated future’ (Jeevendrampillai et al. 2017, 2).

17 Gustav Metzger had similar objectives with his own auto-destructive art. According to Lucy Watling, ‘the artist sought to emphasise how even mechanically-produced objects—in which he believed society was placing a dangerous level of faith—would ultimately degrade, a process over which humans would have no control’ (Watling 2012).

18 ‘Morbius’ is the sole monster on the planet Altair IV. See Eichenberger (2019, 38); see also Wierzbicki (2005, 40): ‘we use the actual dying of that circuit; you can hear it going through the agonies of death and winding down.’

19 ‘[Y]ou think they’ll do one thing, and usually they do something even more interesting that you hadn’t expected’ (Greenwald 1986; Spitfire Audio n.d.b).

20 ‘Tape that self-destruct are nothing new [sic]—Basinski famously used the accidental process of his old loops disintegrating to create the beautiful Disintegration Loops album. But to do it on purpose is something I have not heard so far. Because I don't have twenty years to wait until my tapes have gone bad, I use mechanical tools … to surprising results’ (Hainbach 2019a).

21 Here, employing André Leroi-Gourhan’s typology of percussion, we can classify the oppositional tools as ‘percussion of contact’ (Bachelard 1947, 33).

22 Sarah Dillon differentiates between ‘palimpsestic’ production of reinscribed texts and the complex ‘palimpsestuous’ surface structure of the palimpsest (Dillon 2005, 245).

23 ‘[I]t is a manuscript whose creation paradoxically involves repeated erasures or destructions’ (see de Groote 2005, 245).

24 Durations taken from edited Bandcamp recordings.

25 As John Cage argues, ‘If we think that things are being repeated, it is generally because we don’t pay enough attention to all of the details’ (See Kostelanetz and Cage 1987, 115).

26 My translation.

27 ‘The overriding desire of most children is to get at and see the soul of their toys … When this desire has implanted itself in the child’s cerebral marrow, it fills his fingers and nails with an extraordinary agility and strength. The child twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes it, bumps it against walls, throws it on the ground. From time to time he makes it re-start its mechanical motions, sometimes in the opposite direction. Its marvellous life comes to a stop’ (Baudelaire 1964, 202).

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Billy Badger

Billy Badger is currently a Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Tasmania. He has published widely in the fields of contemporary German poetry, music and art.