Mohammad SalemyPlayback Sessions

Playback, in its oldest sense, means playing something again. On 11 March 1829, in the building that now houses Gorki, the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted Bach's St Matthew Passion at the Sing-Akademie, about a century after it was first performed or even had been barely heard since Bach's death. He shortened and rearranged the piece for his audience. The performance started the Bach revival and with it the idea that music of the past could be edited and presented again to a new audience.

PLAYBACK SESSIONS, the counterpart to FEEDBACK SESSIONS at Gorki, is inspired by this gesture and will apply it to pop music, along with music videos, television series, and social media reels and stories, playing them back to a live audience in a theatrical setting and in a more contemplative and focused form.

In a second sense, Playback is the technical reproduction of recorded sound. In early 1930, Marlene Dietrich arrived at the Sing-Akademie with the composer Friedrich Hollaender and his Jazz Symphoniker to record the songs of her album Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). In these sessions she recorded Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt in German along with its English version, Falling in Love Again, the song that became her signature. The hall built in 1827 for the Sing-Akademie's choir now served as a recording studio, where a voice performed once could be pressed onto shellac and played back on gramophones far beyond Berlin. 

What we call pop has historically reached its audience this way.

In a third sense, Playback means to pretend to be performing to a recording. On 21 July 1989, at a concert in Bristol, Connecticut, the prerecorded tape behind Milli Vanilli, the duo assembled by the German producer Frank Farian, jammed and repeated the line "Girl, you know it's…" again and again while the two men on stage were left speechless. In November 1990 Farian admitted that neither of them had sung on the record, thus their Grammy for the best new artist was withdrawn. The scandal made the essence of pop clear: in the modern era, voice, body and image are produced separately and later put together for the audience. PLAYBACK SESSIONS looks at how this figure is constructed.

Each of these moments belongs as much to the history of technology as to the history of music or culture. The Sing-Akademie was itself a technology, a hall built so that a public gathered in one room could hear music clearly at the same moment. Magnetic tape took sound out of that room, making it possible for it to be stored and edited. It let the voice exist without the body of the speaker. In the 1960s, bands like the Beatles and Beach Boys elevated the recording studio from a passive space where music took place to an active participant in the making of music. From the late 1970s the sampler turned the archive of recorded music into an instrument, so that a fragment of an old record could become the core of a new hit single. The smartphone has since made almost everyone a producer as well as a listener, and pop now arrives as vertical reels that last seconds and stories that disappear within a day. Each new machine changed what pop could sound and look like.

PLAYBACK SESSIONS treats the two histories of music and technology as one: a record is played on a turntable, a reel is shown on the vertical LED wall outside, a phone screen at the scale of a building, all happening in a building that was originally built as a machine for listening.

To function as an intellectual exercise, PLAYBACK SESSIONS uses curatorial methods together with the tools of art history and literary theory. Pop is made up of sounds, images and words. A lyric can call up an image as sharp as anything on a screen. An image can also invoke a sound much louder than any speaker. Sounds, by playing continuously in time, give the whole experience the appearance of a lifeform.

PLAYBACK SESSIONS reads these realities through images on screen, like a music video or a social media reels, the image a lyric conjures in the listener's mind, or even the image of the artist as a persona assembled over years across their career and public appearances. Since Pop also generates its own legends and conspiracy theories, the series treats them like any other pop product, judged by how far and deep they penetrate the public mind.

PLAYBACK SESSIONS asks what a focus on pop, a modern phenomenon made to be consumed at speed, can produce once it is slowed down to the pace of thinking.