The Frankfurt imprint of the P16.D4 circle, where the catalogue is itself an argument about information and control, and the records are closer to sound art than to music.
Selektion is the Frankfurt experimental label the Bureau files at Tier III, built around the musique-concrète collective P16.D4 and its central figure Ralf Wehowsky. Its name and framing are deliberate: the label has described itself by the systems that produce, select and channel information to maintain control in advanced industrial societies, which tells you the operation thinks of itself as a concept as much as a catalogue.
The records bear that out. Achim Wollscheid's pieces for the label amount to sound art, works that play buildings and objects rather than instruments, and Wehowsky's own cut-and-recombine method pushes source material to the edge of legibility. There are collaborative documents too, including a live set pairing Wollscheid with Merzbow, and the spinoff projects RLW and S.B.O.T.H.I. orbit the same circle.
It belongs to a specific German tendency, the conceptual-experimental wing that also produced Auf Abwegen and the dadaist Dom Elchklang, closer to the gallery and the essay than to any dancefloor.
The Bureau's reading. Selektion is filed at Tier III as the documentary home of the P16.D4 axis and a node of the German conceptual-experimental scene.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene