Dieter Roth and Music
Harmonica Curse
Edizioni Periferia, Lucerne, 2014
Softcover with flaps, silkscreen printing on cardboard cover
312 pages, 156 x 232 mm
German, English
Ed. by Edizioni Periferia Lucerne; Kunsthaus Zug; Hochschule für Musik / Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Musik-Akademie Basel. With essays by Peter Kraut, William Furlong and Gianni Paravicini.
Harmonica Curse is a long-term diary that Dieter Roth kept in sound and images. In the year 1981, the artist played 74 times for an hour on his accordion. He recorded this improvised music on cassette each time. The result is a set of 74 cassettes that Roth made into an edition along with Polaroid photos of his immediate environment. This intimate musical and photographic work, Harmonica Curse, is at one and the same time a private musical archive and a conceptual series that had remained unknown in its complete form until today. The audio and photographic documents are here accompanied by Roth’s diary entries from this time.
In collaboration with Camillo Paravicini.