Packaged like an LP, this is a visual and aural catalogue of Christof Migone’s 2008 exhibition Disco Sec—a self-portrait made up of his own record collection. The package serves up a lush documentation of the artwork in the show, including Rimmed Record, a series of rims from the outside circumferences of vinyl records, the part before the grooves start; Cut Cut, a collage of the front and back covers of the Slits’ album of the same name; and Single, a series of 45 RPM covers printed with the song lyrics in alphabetical order. Many of these artworks serve as a visual reminder of the obsessive need for order that is an undercurrent of record collecting, mimicking the documentation required to make sure that a collection—and by extension, its owner—is complete.
The collection includes a full-length CD of the sound from the exhibition, called Partition. A seventy-four-minute-long collection of the first and last second of every song on one hundred albums from Migone’s collection, placed at the exact second that they occur on their respective albums. Listening to it provokes the empathy of common experience (such as the moment I recognized the short blast of Brian Eno or Fugazi from my own collection) but it also imposes an eerie linearity on the habit of listening. The physical objects of Migone’s show, mainly composed of repurposed vinyl, emphasized the circularity of listening practice—the record as an eternal return. Partition, in contrast, enforces a timeline on the act of listening, and its fleeting sonic snippets create a sense of inevitability, almost as though we were listening to a life passing before our ears.
