TONSPUR G

Psychedelic Kitchen Memories
Curated by Jozef Cseres
TONSPUR für einen öffentlichen raum 2025

Preview • Sunday 4 May • 17:00
Opening words • Jozef Cseres

This work consists of four recordings.

The first was recorded in December 2021 in Budapest at the audio-visual performance by DoN’t Eat Group, which was created in response to the sudden death of one of the group’s core members, István Diák (1970–2021), whom we commemorated with my live psychedelic noise music solo and a colourful, trance-like retrospective video.

The second was recorded in October 2024 in my residence studio apartment at the MQ. The sounds of eating a dinner of mushrooms, and washing the dishes can be heard in slow motion, just as we might hear them during a psychedelic trip: strangely distorted.

The third is my new remix of our piece, originally recorded in 2002 by the Sonic Catering Band, modulated from the sounds of food and the kitchen, evoking the auditory drone we experience during a psychedelic trip.

In the fourth recording, we can hear a list of foods that are said to facilitate psychedelic trips, read aloud by an online reading program and recorded with a dictaphone.

Our identities in the present era are created from the totality of our memories. We create a dream-like alternative reality from the memories that constantly bubble up into our life. Becoming aware of this subjective reality is essentially the creation of a ‘reality tunnel’ that is unique to each of us. Awareness itself is a psychedelic melting pot: as we put the elements together, a new sonic reality emerges from the conglomerate, eliminating objective reality. The flow and the effects of memories and our personality in inner space correspond to everything we think about sound: a prima materia that is an ‘interbeing’, constantly changing yet remaining the same. Through the mysterious unifying process of cooking, a new, complex dish is created inside us from the buffet of ingredients produced by the soul. This is a sound-manna that reveals the deep structure of the sound which is nothing other than the spiritual starting point of our own existence, the only Archimedean point from which the world can be moved.

Zsolt Sőrés, born in Budapest, Hungary in 1969, lives and works in Berlin, Germany. 88th TONSPUR-Artist-in-Residence at MQ in Vienna in October 2024.