Christof Migone - Wet Water (Let’s Dance) (2023)

I have been listening to Christof Migone’s collection Wet Water (Let’s Dance) on loop for several days straight, the tracks playing alternatingly from my laptop, a bluetooth speaker in the bedroom, and the hi-fi in the lounge, following me around the house. I’m enjoying living with these sounds, and the feeling of ingesting them day by day in small gulps and sips, a constant drip-feed. This collection suits a domestic, everyday listening environment, poised in the liminal space of not-quite- or not-yet-music, but with an unhurried and strange intentionality that separates it from noise. Each time Éternuité (Forever Sneeze) begins I startle. It may be muscle memory; the sneeze as vector of contagion in pandemic-times. Twelve seconds: three sniffs, a sneeze, a vague exhaled sigh. Like many of the body-noises assembled here, these ones feel more semiotic than physical. An indexical grammar of sneezing. Then we’re in an Empty (Bucket): the distinctive tone of turbulent water in hollow metal, interrupted by high-frequency microphone feedback and interference—two recurring motifs of these pieces, electronic noise and watery flows. The repetitive slosh of heads dunking again and again, disoriented and dissociated, in the electronic squelch of the bucket, water flowing in and out of eyes, mouths, ears. Migone says “we are bodies of water and therefore performative and relational orality is slippery.”

Like much of the artist’s work across diverse media, these pieces reflexively thematise, compose, and perform rituals of inarticulation, impediment, incapacity to speak and communicate. What is a text trapped in a mouth full of water, with the words choked and half-swallowed, spat and dribbling out? Language steaming up, glitching, almost comprehensible, like morse code in static at sea. In Vegass a single word is elongated and stretched over minutes, becoming a syntactic drone, interrupted by the occasional resonant clattering of what I imagine as teeth falling from a gaping visage. The stretched word feels like monument to ‘dumb’ materiality, words as always noise before signification. This piece, like many, is laced with feedback; fluctuating and often gentle, sounds recording and re-recording themselves, accumulating layers, and self-amplifying at the threshold of control. In Langue Distance a phone dials and rings, and sounds of licking flow down the line, wet signals with the charge of fetish. Telephones connect that which they dislocate: bodies, voices, breath, mouths, ears. The medium of the telephone is both distance and proximity. Dialtones and code-buttons punching out a secret message, distorted by the tele—distance—between sender and receiver. Later, when Éternuité (Forever Sneeze) returns for an extended redux, a voice says “I’m not feeling it, you need to get a bag of dust.” Another says, “like a torture chamber,” and giggles.

The four pieces constituting The Release (Into Motion), which take up the entirety of disc two, are different, more conventionally ‘musical’ in structure and style, but still sharing, as with all of Migone’s work, a conceptual sensibility and feeling of underlying logics at work. In each piece, layers of roughly pitched electronics tones flow into and around each other, as if mirroring the dynamic surfaces, continuous motion, interference patterns, and interacting currents of ocean waves. These sounds derive from a performance work in which Migone held a tomato frozen in a block of ice in his mouth while it slowly melted over more than thirty minutes—a painful looking exercise, based on the documentation images. How such an endurance ritual produced these sounds is mysterious and oblique, but at the same time highly suggestive. Like so much of the work captured and documented in this collection, the relation between elements is abstract, entangled, puzzle-like in its weirdness, and all the more rewarding for that. 


— Joel Stern