Achim Wollscheid.

Achim Wollscheid is the Frankfurt-based German installation, conceptual and sound artist whose practice covers four decades and three documented phases. The catalogue's earliest material circulates under the alias S.B.O.T.H.I. · an acronym for Swimming Behaviour of the Human Infant · through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Wollscheid was the longest-term P16.D4 collaborator with P16.D4, the German electronic-noise collective active 1980–1988 around Ralf Wehowsky, Ewald Weber, Achim Szepanski, Gerd Poppe, Roger Schönauer and Stefan E. Schmidt. The Last.fm P16.D4 biography records the relationship: The longest-term collaboration was with the installation and conceptual artist Achim Wollscheid, who used P16.D4 sounds as the basis for LPs he recorded under the name SBOTHI. The SBOTHI method · tape cut-up, recycling, and transformation of P16.D4's already-cut-up source material · sits one further methodological step away from the original source than P16.D4 itself.

Wollscheid co-founded the Selektion label and art-organisation with Ralf Wehowsky as the publishing infrastructure for the catalogue and its surrounding network. The Chain D.L.K. interview note: He was one of the brains behind the influential label Selektion, together with Ralf Wehowsky. Using Selektion, he produced several interesting pieces, such as the entire discography of legendary German noise / industrial band P16.D4. Selektion has published LPs, CDs, books, visual art and design across its run; its catalogue carries P16.D4, SBOTHI, RLW, Achim Wollscheid, Bernhard Günter and adjacent artists. Per the label's own self-description: Selektion is an art-organisation and company located in Germany. The label sits structurally adjacent to the contemporary-art and experimental-electronic infrastructure rather than the conventional music-industry distribution infrastructure · Selektion releases circulated through art-and-bookshop channels and the European experimental music network.

The 1992 Eleven Live Collaborations on Selektion is the catalogue's anchor cross-tradition document · a free improvisation with Merzbow / Masami Akita, recorded across Wollscheid's 1991–1992 European tour with Akita. The recording places SBOTHI / Wollscheid inside the European-and-Japanese experimental-noise circuit the 1990s catalogue threads through (per Scaruffi: His electronic roots were still visible on Eleven Live Collaborations). The same period carries Wollscheid's co-founding of Radio X in Frankfurt (1992), a community radio station founded with Petra Ilyes and other artists; German law's requirement that radio stations transmit at all times became the conceptual seed for Wollscheid's long-running interest in never-ending or unlimited-duration sound work.

The late-1990s shift toward computer-driven installation is the catalogue's second documented phase. The 1997 Moves (Selektion) used household objects as percussion instruments played according to a computer algorithm · the method is structurally one step removed from the SBOTHI tape-cut-up method, with the algorithm replacing the tape splice as the catalogue's organising principle. Acts (Selektion, 1998) employed different events and techniques to produce sound. Airs (Ritornell, 1999) was a live performance in which Wollscheid played simultaneously several different works of electronic music. Shifts (Ritornell, 2000) is a one-hour exercise in vivisecting two minutes of a CD · a sustained operation on a tiny source. 60 x X (Ritornell, 2003) was produced by synthesizing.

The 2000s and 2010s practice is mainly site-specific installation, performance and radio work. The Tate's catalogue note on Wollscheid: Wollscheid makes radio works, sound works, performances and installations that play on the interactions between light, sound and structure. The 2011 Tate-commissioned Nonrepetitive is an online, interactive, real-time sound work that was hosted on the Tate website between 2011 and 2012. Users could access a window with a thin black line on a white background and a constantly changing sound would begin playing; users could move the line by clicking and dragging it (and could see other users moving the line), with the line's motion reflecting in changes to the sound. The programme never allowed constant silence and self-restarted automatically on crash. The conceptual seed for the piece traces back to the 1992 Radio X never-ending sound-piece sketch. Wollscheid's own remark on the medium-determines-duration principle: The medium decides what can be done · 3 minutes of music on a single, 27 minutes on the LP, 80 minutes on the CD and never-ending on the computer.

Recent collaboration. The 2015 Chain D.L.K. interview with Wollscheid and Bernhard Schreiner notes that both prefer playing live rather than physical releases; the duo's recent appearance on the Baskaru catalogue, Calibrated Contingency, is the recording of a collaborative live performance held in Graz in 2011. Schreiner is a photographer, filmmaker, musician and installation artist who studied for seven years at the Academy of Fine Arts under the experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka. Wollscheid's recorded output has reduced from the late-1990s peak; the catalogue's emphasis has shifted toward live performance and site-specific installation work.

Citation. The Bureau files Achim Wollscheid at Tier I as the long-term P16.D4 collaborator (under the SBOTHI alias), as co-founder of the Selektion label and art-organisation with RLW, and as the German contemporary-art and experimental-electronic practitioner whose later computer-driven installation practice extends the 1980s industrial-noise method into the algorithmic and site-specific modes. The cross-references across this archive: the P16.D4 collaboration as the catalogue's anchor entry; the Merzbow / Masami Akita 1992 free improvisation Eleven Live Collaborations; the Selektion catalogue item alongside RLW, Bernhard Günter, P16.D4 and the Selektion network; the Radio X Frankfurt founding and the later Tate commission as the catalogue's radio / online-work parallels. The Bureau holds Wollscheid's practice as one of the longer documented German practices threading the 1980s industrial-noise tradition into the contemporary sound-art infrastructure.