PL Night, 2023-2024
Volksbühne Berlin
A special block of PL Night programming in collaboration with Hugo Esquinca for the Volksbühne, Roter Salon in Berlin. Having began in 2023, the series continues with supplemental funding by MusikFonds DE.
Untitled Theatre Work 1 2023
Volksbühne Berlin
Theatre work conceived for implementation with Dr.Kathleen Klein and Elizabeth Davis.
CONCEPTUALIZATION / STAGE DESIGN / AUDIO : NICK KLEIN
CHOREOGRAPHY AND MOVEMENT : DR. KATHLEEN KLEIN
VIDEO WORK : ELIZABETH DAVIS
FILMING AND EDITING : HYUNGJOON KIM
FILMING ASSISTANCE : SUNKYU LEE
STAGE MANAGER : DOMINGO CASTILLO A
UDIO MASTERING : PHIL MAIER
TYPOGRAPHY IMPLEMENTATION : DOMINIQUE SAIEGH
Special thanks to Marlene Engel for continued support.
Hell Is Other People/ Radio 2023
Grove Berlin
Hell is Other People/Radio takes its name from a line in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1944), in which the three main characters find that hell is indeed an inescapable room with other people. Ironically, however, hell becomes a reflection on the self – it is the revelation of oneself in other people that proves most unbearable. Yet, what Klein posits is neither so negative nor so definitive: Klein’s suggested discomfort ironizes his own fluidity between a studio practice intent on the production of 2D works, primarily on paper, and a more social(ized) sound practice. If Klein’s work operates as a reflection of his relationship to various social, political, economic, and artistic contexts, the discontent that drives his near-constant, multi-medial production stems from within.
In turn, the visitor is encouraged to move between and cognitively merge this multitude of inputs and outputs. Meant to be viewed en masse, the overabundance of stimuli in Klein’s 2D work appears akin to the enveloping nature of sound. The viewer is prone to awe in the Biblical sense—meaning is made through simultaneous combination and rejection, unable to take it in all at once. At times gently, at times forcefully; at times sincerely, and at times ironically, Klein makes clear: rapture has no preference of mode, only effect.
Hell is Other People/Radio’s sound element will exist (at varying intervals) throughout the duration of the exhibition, streamed online. Klein, along with the gallery, will organise programming, weaving together the communities within which the artist and gallery live and work. In this instance, meaning is itself articulated by other people: guests join to share their work, ideas, and secrets, giving credence to Klein’s practice that at every turn invokes the potential for collaboration. Yet, as Klein serves as the locomotive for this group production, the essence of the show is brought full-circle: the desire to create repeatedly, without end, reveals a wholly internal impulse.
Bring The Flowers To The Theatre, 2023
SARA’S New York
“Bring The Flowers to the Theatre” is an exhibition that roots itself as a site of production and exchange, with Nick Klein negotiating roles as maker, organizer, and collaborator. Centered around a stage-as-sculpture, the gallery operates as an invitational space for performance, lectures, radio, and collaborations. Conceptually orbiting around aurality as an access point and a grounding thematic of ecstatic potential, Klein’s stage is a catalyst for a generative flow of indeterminate variables of communal making. While the stage operates as an impetus, billboards act as an index of remnants, providing a non-linear chronology of the five-week collaborative excursion.
See Archive
Live at DUST, 2023
Performance, SARA’S New York
Improvisation on modular synth for New York City based streaming platform Dust as a part of their weekly inclusion in “Bring The Flowers To The Theatre” at SARA’S.
Slippin Out C90, 2022
Enmossed, North Carolina
After nearly a decade of building his sonic practice between numerous releases on labels such as L.I.E.S., Viewlexx, Alter, and iDEAL, and curating his own eclectic imprint Psychic Liberation, Nick Klein delivers a long-form masterwork via 𝑺𝒍𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒏 𝑶𝒖𝒕. Some previously-released tracks hinted at Klein's interest in the durational aspects of performance and listening, but after nearly three years of recording, 𝑺𝒍𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒏 𝑶𝒖𝒕 fully conceptualizes those proclivities.
Traversing diverse timbres and structures over 90 minutes across four tracks, Klein draws upon his cross-disciplinary experience in the totemic physicality of sculpture and installation. Beginning with intense waves of modulating oscillators, creating a vista of ghostly interferences and superpositions, Klein seamlessly transitions to a looping vocal, ascending the listener to higher planes - pure mana for the ears. Side B opens with a more muted excursion, excavating somber glassy canyons before ending with concrete-esque tape manipulations, and finally, several minutes of silence.
Klein also delves deeply into the personal, dedicating the album to "all the friends lost caught up slippin out." A direct line is drawn between the despair of late-stage capitalism and the allure of "slippin out", especially for those most susceptible. As loss impacts his patchwork of networks and community, Klein reflects on who is left to share with. 𝑺𝒍𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒏 𝑶𝒖𝒕 is the documentation of that study.
“BURN/DODGE” Nick Klein + Zach Hart, 2022
Markisches Museum Berlin
“Burn/Dodge” is an 8 channel audio work resulting from a collaboration between artists Zach Hart and Nick Klein. Utilizing the Markisches Museum photo archive, the pair reference photographic works that center the artists lived and projected experiences as Americans in Germany. Photographic documentation of austere mass gatherings (right-wing political rallies, opera houses, sporting events) were root mappings for the rhizomatic process-based development within “Burn/Dodge”. The trajectory of approaching the photography, spatial intervention at the site of the photos, further archival and topical research, and end sonic outcome forms a non-linear tracing of the artists meditation inside of their chosen geography. “Burn/Dodge” opens with a field recording of the former “Sportspalast”, the site of a document of a rally for Ardenauer. The striking aesthetic severity of the photograph with it’s banners sits in contrast to it’s open concrete park setting of today. The field recording documents the artists walking around the environment playing male choir music, a favorite of Ardenauer, as well as the playback of music from the band Kraftwerk’s mid-career catalog. Male choir and cathedral music is the thematic of the next chapter, with different deconstructed audio extrapolations collaged referencing resynthesized field recordings from a cathedral. On the third chapter, a stoic prose assessing the way photography and archival contexts abstract the way aesthetic information is processed. In the concluding fourth movement, dissociation and anxiety takes hold to round out a study on being somewhere you never thought you would be.
Parasocial Relations, 2022
Emerson Dorsch, Miami
Perpetual loop for one speaker powered by consumer grade personal amplification system of beating oscillation.
FROM THE EXHIBITION :
This is the time. And this is the record of the time PT3.
Emerson Dorsch is pleased to announce, This is the time. And this is the record of the time PT3, a group exhibition curated by Carlos Rigau with works by Jessica Gispert, Nick Klein, Seung-Min Lee, T. Eliott Mansa, Karen Rifas, Irgin Sena, Matt Taber and Andy Van Dinh. The exhibition will be on view from July 8th – August 20th, 2022.
The exhibition’s title cites Laurie Anderson’s 1982 song “From the Air,” which channels and distills a widely felt intuition that disaster is at hand. Itself, a pun on the expression conveying zeitgeist; the song expresses symptoms of and reasons for this intuition. There seemed to be, at the time, a loss of personal control over one’s own fate, much less the world’s. The speed and quantity of technology were faster than any one person could keep up with. While news of global crises just as quickly spread and, similarly, piled up.
Country Music Party, 2022
Universität der Kunst, Berlin
Country Music Party is the first iteration in a series of stage sculptures wherein the stage structure is utilized for a participatory activity. With this work, the loose thematic parameters. centered around American Country Music, utilize karaoke to illustrate the narratives within the cultural content. Given this activity occured in Berlin, the cultural juxtaposition was prescient. However, as the evening progressed and the narrative tropes inherent to the genre became clear (discontent with work, heartbreak, impossible love, etc), participants felt compelled to include their own coloquial versions of the music. This created a unique exchange amongst various folk musics of the participants in the project.
Also included were performances by Glyn Maier and Patrick Gallagher, on tour in Europe for the first time, from the United States.
HERRENSAUNA X PSYCHIC LIBERATION, 2022
RSO, Berlin
Berlin party collective Herrensauna invited Psychic Liberation to collaborate on curating a night of club music.PL NIGHT #2 , 2022
Seendosi, Seoul
An evening of performances with PL artists and cohorts at Seoul’s Seendosi bar. The first PL event in Seoul, and my first performance in the city.
Performance, 2022
Waiting Room, Meinblau, Berlin
Closing performance for "Waiting Room" exhibition at Mainblau, curated by Jiin Jeong and Mauro Ventura.
Performance amongst installation remnants of a performance Mauro Ventura and Kiani Del Valle, and sculptures by Meltem Rukiye Calisir.
The exhibition ‘Waiting Room’ takes as its starting point the Buddhist notion of patience, a state merging the past and future into the present moment and triggering awareness. This deeper consciousness is reflected on both digitally and organically, with the question how can that which is unknown affect that which is now?
Dekmantel Podcast Series, 2022
Amsterdam
On invitation to participate in the Dekmantel podcast series, I put together a layered mix of abstractions from the Psychic Liberation catalog, attempting to reorient the listening givens within that context.
BT/SC/ECDER/S2D, 2022
Universität der Kunst, Berlin
“BT/SC/ECDER/S2D” is a prototype for a process based sculptural installation utilizing sound, archive materials, and print edition.
Over the course of my life I have collected ephemera in various forms of media and clothing relating to subcultural music experiences. Some of the items collected are related to experiencing something obligatorily sentimental through memorabilia , and some are cataloged to form a library mapping a taste I have developed. Recently looking through a pile of t-shirts, I found two older and tactilely remarkable shirts. One shirt was a gift from an older friend in Seattle, an item from the 1980’s Industrial group Sleep Chamber (Boston, Massachusetts) . The other I had bought off the street in New York City as a very small child, a tour shirt from the 1990’s American grindcore band Brutal Truth.
Plague Process 1, 2021
Den Haag
In assessing the way “..the world, humans, and life will have changed” I look back to moments before the imposition of the hyperobject of the global pandemic. It is through this reflective perspective I can qualify and quantify the impact of the pandemic and form a working artistic narrative of inquiry. The installation here operates from two “thought islands”, with one island of media pulling from my personal relationship to the topicality and the other island of media taking on broader commentary to the content.
The installation sits on display in the red light district of Den Haag, Netherlands. One thought island utilizes footage of an audience captured at a performance I filmed in Paris on hi8 video the evening before the pandemic lockdown occurred in Europe, presented on a mounted freestanding flat screen television in split screen. The discrepancy in experience firmly grounds the disparity in relational activities pre and post-pandemic precautionary measures. The second “thought-island” is the table displayed modular synthesizer, amplified by a discarded home surround sound system. The synthesizer is processing and deconstructing in real time sourced texts from the essay “Social Contagion : Microbiological Class War in China” (chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/). The essay outlines the direct correlation of developmental expansion into nature through the objectives of contemporary late-stage capitalism to the introduction of previously dormant viruses to the masses due to environment erasure.
Documentation and Video Editing assistance : RJM VanDerHeyden
Performance, 2021
Future Intel, Den Haag
Den Haag streaming platform Future Intel invites Nick Klein for a live performance on the channel.
ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY, 2020
IDEAL, Gothenburg
"Actor-Network Theory" is the final record Nick Klein made as a resident of New York City. Recorded in 2018, it weaves a disparate sonic narrative of dissociative opiated sleeping-bag retreats, and anxiety fueled drum loops. "Actor-Network Theory" is right before the beginning of the second act. Music for sleeping in a cold basement with a short blanket, coughing up a cigarette at Pier 94 in February, or lamenting the fickle nature of one's own metabolism. Staring up and out to a curved glass ceiling from an unremarkable angle, is it possible to dip your toes in the acrid water of your own terminal beach? It really isn't all so morose, but it's good to remember to check the breaks and tread of the tires.
No Shortage Of Rope LP, 2020
Alter, London
What happens when you arrive to a party and everyone is leaving as you are walking in? If a bass drum booms in the woods but no one is around to hear it, does it even boom at all? Can you build a mansion with playing cards?
Nick Klein returns to ALTER with the cryptically biographical ‘No Shortage of Rope’, his third release for the label and significantly, potentially his first full length album. Consisting of 7 tracks, ‘No Shortage of Rope’ is a consolidated collection of recordings Klein made after leaving his long-term base of NYC to become a full-time resident of Den Haag, Netherlands. Using some newfound free time post-move, Klein wanted to approach his working process in the studio a little differently to create something long form, something that felt more like an album as opposed to being built with the club music paradigm as a given. Describing his time in the studio, Klein says it was “the most hermetic studio endeavour I have ever undertaken”. It certainly seems that Klein harnessed this period of productivity to make the most of what his music could offer as ‘No Shortage of Rope’ is the man in his most pointedly pure form.
Been Home For Months, Mix, 2020
E-Flux Bar Laika, New York
Tracklist:
Arvo Part - Sarah Was 90 Years Old
SCANT - Debilitate (B SIDE)
Strangulated Beatoffs - It's A Vile, Vile, Vile, Vile World
Meredith Monk - Do You Be
Oren Ambarchi - Gene
Pansonic - Hapatus
die Reihe - 106 Kerri Chandler Chords
Chris Fratesi - Untitled
Joachim Nordwall - Control And Energy
Minoru Sato - Asuna
LDSN - 2
LDSN - 4
Balloon Monument - MARCH TAPE SIDE B
Ben Richards - Sky Diver
Thank you Sanna Swedan
Performance, 2020
Seanaps Festival, Leipzig
Performance for Leipzig’s Seanaps Festival.
B2B Performance with Cienfuegos, 2019
Boiler Room, New York
Dual performance set with Cienfuegos for Boiler Room’s streaming from Lost Soul Enterprise’s “Fourth World” party.
Performance, 2018
Thee Eldridge, Rhode Island
Video from closing half of a live performance taken by Matt Underwood at Adam Morowski’s shuttered warehouse home/venue Thee Eldrige in Providence, Rhode Island. Dance accompaniment courtesy of Tomas Bennett.
Alvariño Klein Design Production Systems Team, 2014
Goodwork Gallery, New York
Collaboration with Miguel Alvariño on fourty something paintings for a corporate office park in Miami under the working title “Alvariño Klein Design Production Systems Team”. Before shipping off to Miami, they were exhibited at Goodwork Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
PL, 2013-
New York City, Den Haag, Berlin, ???
PL (primitive languages, Psychic Liberation, Pain Liberation, Partially Listenable) is a multi faceted project operating as a vessel to produce media editions (tape, compact disc, and vinyl formats) and events. Started in 2013 with Miguel Alvariño (until 2019) as a record store in a shipping container in New York City, the label has produced over 100 releaseds as of 2023, collaborating with other labels like Enmossed and gallery spaces like SARA’S, as well as producing events in different countries around the world.
Country Music Paintings, 2011
Studio, Miami
A series of paintings wherein I ruminated on the interconnectivity between my family class history, construction materiality, and the country music my paternal side of the family historically favored and shared with me.
O Mio Babbino Caro / Toomus MerehMereh Nor Good, 2010
Miami
Durational performance work for two performers engaging in repetitious actions over the score of two songs. Amidst the two performances was a large wall work installation of collected materials from print ephemera that was a mainstay in my material workings from this time period. Much of the content was a collection of circumstancial found or meticulously archived materials from Florida, Ohio, and New York City.
Martyr Totem, 2010
Miami
Sculpture, inherited archival Yukio Mishima print media.
1800-411-PAIN, 2010
Miami
Work on paper, drawing and collage.