Nikolaus Urban "Principle and Material Force / Song for Elephants"

'De Appel releases a single by Nikolaus Urban: side A Principle and Material Force / side B Song for Elephants. On this occasion we invite you for a celebration on Saturday October 15, 1983 at 5 p.m. in Studio 98, Lauriergracht 98, Amsterdam.' (Invitation De Appel) ‘The record itself is the artwork. It is a kind of portable installation; taken out of its sleeve and placed on the record player, the sound that it produces will temporarily intrude upon whatever environment it is played in. Indeed, it is deliberately anti-melodic, and although both pieces are vocal, they eschew words altogether, and defy all normal concepts of duration and entity. Principle and Material Force is intense and penetrating, a vibrating volume of multi-tracked layers of vocalisation. Metaphysics joins with physics as principles of power and transcendence are contrasted with a materialism that enables matter to take on a life of its own. This moment of meeting is performed without change, for an eternity, like the music of the spheres. Song for Elephants is slightly more 'lyrical' , but certainly no less strange. Wildly anti-melodic and clumsy, it is rhythmically similar to what one might imagine elephants with absolutely no sense of rhythm would sound like were they able to sing. It is on the edge of a grotesque parody of song.’ (‘Nikolaus Urban. Principle and Material Force / Song for Elephants’, De Appel, 3 (1983) 3, p. 26. Fragment from a review by Michael Gibbs (October 1983) that was printed on the backside of the press release of De Appel.)