Carl Michael von Hausswolff
[SE]
CM von Hausswolff is a composer, conceptual artist, and independent curator based in Stockholm and Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Since the end of the 1970s, Hausswolff has worked as a composer using sound recording devices as his main instrument, and as a conceptual visual artist working with performance art, light and sound installations, and photography.
Hausswolff currently makes use of wide-ranging recording media (camera, tape deck, radar, sonar) to explore and manipulate streams of information, energy fields, and visual and acoustic phenomena, and to produce pure, intuitive studies of energy, frequency and tone, as well as drones with monumental crescendos. His conceptual rigor and tonal intensity has led him to become a leading representative of electronic drone music.
Up until 1996, his audio work consisted of complex drones with a surface of aesthetic elegance and beauty. In 1997 he launched a series of works under the title "Operations of Spirit Communication". This work, inspired by Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) techniques, combined and merged sound and vision using analogue and digital technologies such as oscilloscopes, radars and sonars. His work since has been increasingly reductive. Most recently he has engaged with more corpulent approaches to audio art with subjects such as architecture and urbanization, rats and maggots. His music and sound art can be found on record labels such as Ash International, Laton, Oral, raster-noton, Firework Edition, SubRosa, Die Stadt, and Touch Music.
Hausswolff was born in Linköping, Sweden. He is an authority on the work of Friedrich Jürgenson, an electronic voice phenomena (EVP) researcher who claimed to have detected voices of the dead hidden in radio static. Hausswolff directs a foundation in honour of Jürgenson, and bequeathed his unique archive collection of audiotape recordings to the ZKM | Karlsruhe collection. In 1986, Hausswollf set up the Swedish independent label Radium 226.05 and in 1990 he created his second imprint, Anckarström. He has often collaborated with other artists (such as Erik Pauser, Leif Elggren, Andrew McKenzie, Johan Söderberg, Zbigniew Karkowski, Graham Lewis, David Jackman, Jean-Louis Huhta, and Kim Cascone).
From 2003-07 he curated the sound art project 'freq_out' in Copenhagen, Oslo, Paris, Berlin, Chiang Mai and Budapest. This project includes the individual works from 12 sound artists shown in a collective way. The frequency range from 15 – 12 000 Hz was divided up into 12 sections and handed out to the artists. These exhibitions has showed a new way to deal and treat sound works as an exhibitional form, a form that mostly has been chaotic and non functional in many recent group shows. Contributing artists included Jacob Kirkegaard, J.G. Thirlwell, Jana Winderen, Finnbogi Petursson, Pomassl, Mike Harding, Maia Urstad, BJ Nilsen, Tommi Gronlund&Petteri Nisunen, PerMagnus Lindborg, Kent Tankred, and Brandon LaBelle.
In 2012 Hauswollf was heavily criticized for allegedly stealing ashes of Holocaust victims from the Majdanek concentration camp crematorium and using them in a painting. The Martin Bryder Gallery in Lund pulled the paintings from the exhibition.