Video | Artist’s chocolate vinyl records produce sweet music you can eat afterwards, as she demonstrates in Hong Kong show
Tasmania-based Frenchwoman Julia Drouhin uses a silicone mould to make each chocolate record, then freezes it – allowing listeners to play them up to 10 times, before eating them
Julia Drouhin, a French sound artist from Tasmania, has always been interested in awakening people’s sense of hearing.
She has combined the static, pops and crackles usually heard on the radio to form an audio piece; and in a public performance in Bloemfontein, South Africa, led participants through the city with wind-up radios that have balloons as antennas.
With her latest project, the 34-year-old wants to play on the ephemeral nature of sound. To recreate the ghostly voices she once heard on phonograph cylinders – the earliest commercial medium used to record and reproduce sounds that was popular in the early 20th century – she has created vinyl discs that can be played on a turntable. However, instead of using polyvinyl or shellac, Drouhin opts for an unlikely material: chocolate.
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“It’s close to the wax that makes the cylinder, which is the ancestor of the record. I wanted to have a musical object that would fade out, disappear while it’s played. So it’s just for one unique moment, in one place, one time. It’s not reproducible and it’s unpredictable,” says Drouhin.
With the right recipe and tools, making a chocolate vinyl record is surprisingly simple, as Drouhin recently demonstrated at the Gallery by the Harbour in Tsim Sha Tsui, where her chocolate discs, including ones of Canto-pop, are on show until February 25.
She mixes silicon gel with a reacting agent, then pours it onto an original vinyl disc to construct a mould. Afterwards, tempered chocolate is poured into the mould. Put it the fridge and voilà! You have an edible, playable vinyl disc.