Hainbach — Landfill Totems

The Landfill Totems project started life as a performance installation at PNDT Gallery, expanding exponentially into a full album and an accompanying sound library recorded at Patch Point Studios, Berlin. When observing these anthropomorphic figures, a deep appreciation and affection for the engineering technology of the past is apparent; totally unique vintage machines, assembled for one final swan song (one of the presets captures the sound of a machine dying). Stacked into three monolithic towers resembling totem poles, each piece of equipment was chosen for its distinctive tone generation and modulation abilities — wired together much like a modular synthesiser.

Upcycled and redesigned, these totems act as a commentary on the environmental cost of progress; what was once the pinnacle of technology quickly becomes unviable and destined for the scrapheap, if not for the intervention of Hainbach — creating beauty from that which is thought to be obsolete. Among his collection are once high-end medical, telecommunication and scientific research equipment, vintage sound-testing devices, a Nuclear Instrumentation Modular, an outmoded medical signal generator, a mixer previously used by the Stasi, the state security service in former East Germany, and a Brüel & Kjaer 1613 Bandpass filter creating hi-hat, bass drum and watery sounds.