Objectified: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit

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Jan 19
0

My OCD-propelled obsession with finding the Braun record has finally come to a conclusion. Last month I swore I remembered a techno record made from Braun appliance samples, but couldn’t find anything about it online. Well, a copy of the Braun record arrived in the mail from Objectifier Bharani Padmanabhan, and the mystery has been solved.

Braunmusic was actually an art project released in 1996 by Köln-based painter/sculptor Johannes Wohnseifer and a group of musician friends going by the name Diverse. Johannes has gone on to quite a successful art career in the 12 years since braunmusic. So what does the record sound like? Well… it sounds like 12-year-old German techno.

Here’s an MP3 track from the record (digitized from my turntable, excuse the sound quality). I think the lead synth sound is maybe sampled from a Braun world travel alarm clock? Or maybe not, who knows.

Johannes is currently traveling in Ethiopia, and emailed me: “I wasn’t a musician, I just had the idea for the record’s concept and cover. Then I asked my friends (including Thomas Schaeben and Heiko Voss) to do the music. For all of them this was their first record release. The German publisher Tropen Verlag released it.”

Thanks again to Bharani for finding a copy of this long out-of-print record, and to Johannes for letting us give away a track from it.

Now I’m free to obsess about something else…

– Gary

Categories: Musings

Sep 2
1

The Braun record exists

You may recall that in an earlier post I thought I remembered a techno record made up of Braun appliance sounds? I’d wondered whether it was a figment of my imagination, since no amount of googling could turn up any mention of it. Well I wasn’t crazy, it exists! Braun fanatic and Objectifiers member Bharani Padmanabhan actually has the record in question, and sent me photos, above. He says there are no markings anywhere on the record, no artist name, no record label name, nothing. But it looks exactly as I remembered it. Why would I have that image stored away for 15 years? The brain is a strange instrument…

Bharani is lending me the record for a few weeks. To be continued…

– Gary

Categories: Musings

Aug 1
5

La musique des objets

I was having a conversation with a friend last night about the film, and about the music we’ll be using in it. (I also watched Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil again last night… such an amazing work. It makes me really jealous/insecure as a filmmaker. But that’s a good thing.)

While I can’t talk about the music we’re using yet, something I brought up in the conversation has been bugging me. I could have sworn, maybe about 10 years ago, that someone did an electronic music record that was made up entirely of samples of noises from Braun products. It took the sounds of alarm clock beepings, blenders churning, etc., and used them as the instruments in the songs. Am I just imagining this??? It does sound like something I’d dream up. My friend, a musician, hadn’t heard of it, and I’ve googled six ways to Sunday but I can’t find any mention of it either. Maybe I’m just a bad googler.

Does anyone have any memory of a Braun techno record???

-Gary

Categories: Musings

Jul 29
1

Good music = good design

What’s on Dieter Rams’ reel-to-reel tape player, you ask? Miles Davis, circa 1957, of course! In the late 1950s, jazz was hugely popular in the Frankfurt area, due in part to American Armed Forces radio broadcasts of US jazz groups in Germany. Dieter says that he and his friends were buying jazz records at the time, but their stereo systems were so bad that they weren’t getting to experience the full sound. So this actually pushed them to develop better stereo speakers and audio components at Braun.

Categories: Production Stills