Vinyl C.A. Debussy / Clair de lune Vinyl C.A. Debussy / Clair de lune

He places a record made of ice on the turntable and lowers the needle onto it. As the record slowly spins, music begins, falteringly, to play. As the ice begins to melt and the grooves in the ice record disappear, we hear the melodic refrain begin. The noise is a strikingly new sound, while the original melody on the record resonates inside us as almost an auditory hallucination. While its proper title is VINYL, this work is more widely known as “The Ice Record.” In it a record made of ice is cast from an old-fashioned vinyl record and actually played on a turntable. To Yagi, who was born in 1980, the record is a new and remarkable medium, a fusion of the visible and invisible, in which immaterial sound takes on a defined material form, the grooves in the record. As long as their shape remains unchanged, the same music is always reproduced. By forming his record of ice, which melts over time, Yagi has created a work that indicates, subtly but with fresh force, the literally immaterial state of sound. VINYL, which converts the act of preserving sound, which consists only of vibration, directly into the act of freezing it, through the melting of the ice, raises a variety of questions for those who see and hear the work about sound, formless, endlessly disappearing, and the irreversible flow of time. Yagi, who studied space design as well as art, has been strongly influenced by John Cage’s Chance Operation and works in a variety of media to produce sound objets, texts, plastic forms, videos, and installations. All of his works make uncanny use of readymade functions and components to offer glimpses through cracks in our consciousness and reveal the hidden underside of our perceptions. While it continues Yagi’s explorations of sound and time, VINYL reminds us with pointed wit of the impermanence and transience of life. In a clear and direct manner it communicates the appeal of an artist who says, “There is always something unknown lurking in everyday life.”