ST. GALLEN.- Norbert Möslang (*1952) is internationally known as one of the most prominent and most experiment-happy performers in the field of contemporary electronic music. His film music to Peter Liechtis (*1951) multiple prize-winning film Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy, 2009 set a benchmark and was awarded the Swiss Film Prize in the category of “Best Film Music” and in January 2011 the “Cinema Eye Award for Outstanding Achievement in Composing” within the framework of the “Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking” at the New York Museum of the Moving Image. The Möslang show is on display until May 1, 2011 at the Kunstmuseum.

Concerts with changing partners in all of Europe and tours to Los Angeles, South America and Japan are only part of the programme that Norbert Möslang has these past years embraced as a musician and visual artist. As co-founder of “Voice Crack”, 1972-2002, he—together with Andy Guhl—has since the 1970s expanded the concept of sound generation and sound recycling with “cracked everyday electronics”. In this formation, they represented Switzerland in 2001 at the Biennale di Venezia with an installation that sound-linked the Canal Grande to the Baroque interior of the Church of San Stae via an underwater microphone.

By the use of manipulated everyday electronics instead of traditional instruments, musical expression was enormously expanded. In the radical approach of noise art, Norbert Möslang stands in a long line of tradition that ranges from the Russian avant-garde to free jazz and Fluxus, associating his music with names such as Nam June Paik or John Cage. Since the mid-1980s, Norbert Möslang has increasingly linked the world of experimental sound to exhibition room installations. Meanwhile his current tone and image creations are indivisibly coupled with one another in an exciting field at the interface between experimental music and the visual arts.

The development of digital technology with encoded contractions as they appear in exhibition titles has been able to exploit a whole new visual world. Norbert Möslang taps webcams whose bitstream he makes visible on monitors or as projections and designs an image collection system that surfs from one computer link to the next via the World Wide Web. Tracked through electronic channels, his picture worlds seem at the same time familiar and disconcerting.

During the building phase from February 18th to the 28th 2011, the public was able to be close at hand as Norbert Möslang designed the installation and merged the single aspects into a whole. 370 visitors took this opportunity to peer over the shoulders of the artists and the technical construction team under the direction of Urs Burger and Daniel Boller.