Magnus Schaefer is an art historian and curator. He is the former Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. His publications include _Ull Hohn: Foregrounds and Distances_, ed. Hannes Loichinger and Magnus Schaefer, Berlin: Sternberg Press 2015; _Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010_, ed. Kathy Halbreich, with Mark Godfrey, Lanka Tattersall, and Magnus Schaefer, New York: The Museum of Modern Art 2014; _Dealing With–Some Texts, Images, and Thoughts Related to American Fine Arts, Co._, ed. Valérie Knoll, Hannes Loichinger, and Magnus Schaefer, Berlin: Sternberg Press 2012; and contributions to exhibition catalogues by Michael Krebber and Das Institut/Kerstin Brätsch & Adele Röder.
Inherent to sound recording and distribution technology is not only the possibility of storing and reproducing any given acoustic event, but also a correlating tendency to make incidental and accidental elements—those which are not considered part of the music recorded—constitutive elements in the sound of a recording. This paradoxically essential surplus, as David Grubbs observed…
