Berlin's gelbe MUSIK was the record store and gallery space run by Ursula Block between 1981 and 2014. During its tenure, the storefront exhibited work by artists and composers working at the intersection of art and sound, including Henning Christiansen, Maryanne Amacher, Akio Suzuki, Earle Brown and others
The Gelbe Musik was founded in 1981 by Ursula Block and resided in the former rooms of the gallery of her husband, René Block. A space of about 40 m² was available for exhibitions in one room. The aim of the Gelbe Musik was to show the interrelations between music and visual art. Thus, visual materials - objects, scores, spatial installations, watercolours and drawings related to music - by contemporary German and international artists were shown. In the Gelbe Musik there were numerous solo exhibitions of works by composers as well as visual artists, such as John Cage, Hanne Darboven, Luigi Nono, Christian Marclay, Akio Suzuki, Hans Peter Kuhn, Christina Kubisch, Rolf Julius, Henning Christiansen, Nam June Paik or Piotr Nathan. The 1986 exhibition Artists' Records featured artworks that integrated records as objects. This exhibition was shown in the following years under the title Broken Music in cities such as Grenoble, Montreal, Sidney and Roskilde. The Gelbe Musik also offered CDs, records and books for sale. These ranged from Futurism, Fluxus, meta and minimal music, musique concrète, concrete poetry, sound art/radio art to the "precursors of the avant-garde". Among them were records from very small publishers and private pressings. The Gelbe Musik was a contact point for musicologists, editors, dancers, theatre and film makers, among others.
Gelbe MUSIK (Yellow music) gets its namesake from Kandinsky's color-theory, and he's the first to point out that it's no coincidence that the “sour-tasting lemon and the shrill-singing canary are both yellow.” It's variously the color of joy, aggression, eccentricity, warmth, the trumpet, middle C