Dynamic Vibrations

What happens when twelve tractors become an orchestra?

For Sven-Åke Johansson, born 1943 in Mariestad, the question is serious. Since arriving in West Berlin in 1968, the percussionist, poet and artist has built a body of work in which telephone directories, cardboard, fire extinguishers and cucumbers are treated with the care a drummer brings to a Slingerland kit. No gag, no irony: concentration, notation, attention to how a material sounds and occupies a room.

Dynamic Vibrations – Played with Hands and Feet gathers scores, performance concepts, manifestos, song texts, essays and nine interviews from 1968 to 2024, assembled together with Thomas Groetz and Bastian Zimmermann. The volume traces the path from Swedish dance halls and Paris in 1965 to European free jazz with Peter Brötzmann and Alexander von Schlippenbach, the Peitz Jazz Workshop of 1979, the swing band Night and Day, the Concerto for Twelve Tractors in Kaditzsch in 1996, Harding Greens – Symphony for Cardboard Boxes , and the Berlin Echtzeitmusik generation. Alongside: drawings from the Kreuzberg studio, friendships with Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, absurd poetry in the spirit of Songs of the Screw .

Johansson writes with dry understatement about pauses that speak, hearing by seeing, machines that keep their own time. His instructions can be read, and performed.

An artist's book and source collection, assembled with curiosity rather than monumentality – reproduced in facsimile, annotated, open at every end.