Jochem Hendricks

Whorled Wet Ear, 2018–2022
Sound Piece, 35:56 min.
12“ Vinyl record in Gatefold Cover
Edition of 300

Sound design: Luc Döbereiner
Image Slicer: Philipp Medrala
Graphic design: Harald Pridgar
Legal advice: Dr. Thomas K. Heinz
Publisher: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln

Kindly supported by Hessische Kulturstiftung

The source material for Sound Union: Whorled Wet Ear is the pop song We Are The World by Michael Jackson from 1985. In collaboration with the musician Luc Döbereiner, Jochem Hendricks has deconstructed and reassembled this piece of music. The original piece is cut five times into snippets of different lengths and then rearranged in different densities. This results in five superimposed layers of sound, each revealing changes in different time levels of the original material, thus creating a new piece.

For the design of the gatefold album cover, which was created in collaboration with graphic designer Harald Pridgar, media designer Philipp Medrala developed the program Image Slicer, which can divide image templates into any number of pixels and reassemble them in random mode. The original album from 1985 was processed in this way with Image Slicer, with the number 5 of the world continents inscribed in the default settings of all formal decisions.