You order it, I make it speziell for you, it’s a Unikat.

How is it that a vinyl record costs around CHF30 and CHF40? Why do I earn CHF0.003 per online stream for a piece of music I’ve worked on for days, weeks, months or years? And why, on the other hand, is a contemporary artwork -a painting, a sculpture, a photograph -valued at CHF500? Or CHF5’000?

These questions began to surface for me in the summer of 2020, when I stopped my langjährige Lohnarbeit as a nurse on the ICU and came across the Wu-Tang Clan book Once Upon a Time in Shaolin: The Untold Story of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Million-Dollar Secret Album, the Devaluation of Music, and America’s New Public Enemy No.1. That encounter can be marked as one of the beginnings of my search for the value of contemporary music today.

I quickly realized that the process of making music has become almost entirely invisible to its consumers. If I imagine a “finished” piece of music as an iceberg, what we hear is only the visible part -the tip = the product. A sentence by Saint-Exupéry from The Little Prince feels particularly apt here:
“What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Does it have to be?

Paradoxically, field recordings, research, rehearsals, song fragments, and inspirations drawn from daily life and living are indispensable ingredients for an artist to cook the soup of our work. Out of this realization, I established two rules:
1. I want to create something unique.
2. I want to treat the process as important as the product.

Since 2012, I have been experimenting with music cassettes. Is less less and more more? It became obvious to me that I wanted to bring these two interests together, and in autumn 2020 I launched the project LIMITED x PALIN TAPES. I self-produced and designed the cassettes independently.

Now, looking ahead to 2026, I’ve decided it’s time to take this project up again. As I noted back then:
“At the moment, I can’t imagine a more symbolically powerful medium for capturing the songs and sounds of my daily living life research than a transient one like the analog tape of a music cassette (Ferro that is, of course!). With a practice oriented toward process rather than product, it felt logical to document the process itself -and thereby make it visible.”

For me, this project is an attempt to restore a sense of value to music as a contemporary art form. A never-ending process. Visibility = Value. Every cassette I produce is a unique piece.

2 × 20min (C41), Type I (Ferro), never-ending process, CHF310