Sound Art & Experimental Music in Kassel
Department of Sound, Kunsthochschule Kassel
34121 is the web radio and sonic archive of the Department of Sound at Kunsthochschule Kassel (KHK). It broadcasts continuously from Menzelstraße 13–15 in Kassel, Hessen, Germany — the postcode the project takes its name from.
The department works with sound as a material. Its concerns run through sound art, experimental music, electroacoustic composition, field recording, noise and radio, and its teaching treats listening as something to be practised rather than assumed. The department is also known as Direct Media, and has been led since 2020 by Mario de Vega, Professor of Sound, who also records and performs as MNNN.
The archive
34121 holds a sonic archive of experimental music, noise, avant-garde and countercultural sound: 1,569 catalogued releases in the archive, and 1,820 artist biographies written to accompany them. It is a working reference rather than a collection of holdings — digitised, classified and cross-referenced, so that a release connects to the artist who made it and to the broadcasts it has appeared on.
Alongside it are 20 mixtapes and archive exploration sessions, broadcast with full tracklists.
Teaching and guests
The department teaches 53 seminars — among them Attenuation, Agnotology, Aether, Affordance and Animism — each taking a single concept as the way into a body of listening. It has hosted 43 guest artists, lecturers and visiting practitioners, and runs Interferences, a series of encounters and interventions.
Studios
The infrastructure comprises a modular synthesis system, a recording booth, a multichannel room, a standalone studio and the software environment that runs across them. The studios are available to students of the department, and technical manuals and tutorials document them.
Radio
The stream runs continuously, and is part of a wider network of independent and experimental radio — including p-node.org — listed under Network. Programme strands include Flujos and No ID.
Contact
Department of Sound, Kunsthochschule Kassel
Menzelstraße 13–15
34121 Kassel
Germany
Prof. Mario de Vega — mario_devega@uni-kassel.de
kunsthochschulekassel.de