Rick Myers Obstacle #80: Indices

This LP forms an index to a body of artwork called Obstacle Corpus, encompassing drawing, writing, photographic and book works, video and sound. For the recording, Rick alternated between the same note on two pianos, played at once, with a spoken text. The text was written in two parts, using the titles of 75 artworks made during 2019, interspersed with a Field text, written as a form of drawing. Tape recordings of the performance were exposed to magnetic fields and amplified back through a piano using electromagnetic and physical contact with its strings, making a circuit that occasionally emited sparks during the recording.

For those of us that require categories such as non-music, anti-music and broken-music to predetermine how we listen to a record Obstacle #80: Indices is maybe a genuine non-music record for people who also actually like music a bit. Let’s say the noises engraved on this piece of plastic are a handy by-product of Rick Myers’ artistic disciplines that will also appeal to people who appreciate Popol Vuh, François Tusques, Karel Goeyvaerts, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, AR Luciani, Katalin Ladik, Jean Guérin, Igor Whakevitch, Milan Grygar, Jean Dubuffet and even the prepared piano film soundtracks of Andrzej Korzynski and Jean-Claude Vannier. Does that sound good? The nuts and bolts behind the making of this album is the business of Rick’s art practice (which you can look forward to reading about elsewhere) but let’s just say: You had me at two open pianos, magnetic fields and transducer mic.