Ted Reichman - Artwork 

Since around 2020, I have been developing a sound/visual art practice that explores the materiality of music and language and their shifting economic and affective meanings and values through the transformation of worthless records into digital sounds and physical visual artworks. The first public manifestation of this project was Orgelwerke, a suite of sound pieces made out of samples of discarded rare classical pipe organ LP’s, which the UK experimental record label Touch released on their organ-focused Spire imprint in 2023. Since then, using similar methods, I have created two more album-length digital sound works which (hopefully) will be released in 2025, and also expanded this project into visual works including graphic scores and a large-scale hybrid sound/visual work in progress called Words and Music.

Ten Tragedies

In the fall of 2024, while working on an album-length sound piece based on Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, I started to think about cover art. I picked up a damaged copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare which happened to be hanging around my studio, and sliced the pages of Romeo and Juliet into tiny strips, mirroring the sampling methodology of the music. I reassembled them in random order, then painted over them with gesso until they turned into a haze. I went on to make ten more 12x12 in pieces on canvas using this process.

Words and Music

The Words and Music series of hybrid sound/visual works are all made through a ritualistic process of destruction and recreation. A 78 rpm shellac record from a pile left in my garage by the previous owners is digitized using a mechanical crank gramophone and a digital recording studio, then smashed and transformed into paint. I then sample the recording and start making it into a sound piece, while at the same time making the visual works below through a long, repeated process of writing lyrics from the song with charcoal and painting over them with layers of acrylic and the transformed 78.

Selected Works on Paper

Graphic Score

usausa (for four or more players) is a set of twenty five double charcoal drawings on 9x12 paper, meant to be played by an ensemble of any instrumentation.