The Twentieth Century
The Twentieth Century
MOSZ M-025 CD (2014)
The sleeve design announcing the music of the TWENTIETH CENTURY here enclosed reminds me of an installation piece by Cornelia PARKER displaying the suspended splintered remains of an exploded garden shed, in a gallery space. Frozen explosion, explosante (almost) fixe. Like : it’s static, but you read it in slow motion (the effect of juxtaposing the actual blown away shed in the gallery space, and the displayed picture of what it used to be). Here do we seem to experience the opposite : the moving music of a (almost) static landscape, a permanence. A water-coloured here and now, albeit in perpetual motion, unfolding its waves around, not forward. And the striking phenomenon is that you don’t see the object, like an emerging island : you just monitor the waves unfolding around an absent center. Then the illusion shows : it reverberates, chimes, heavy waves echo one another, swells upwards… From the titles on, it’s very cinematic and physical, through its way of treating space via this “flux/reflux” pattern. There’s a definite liquid feel, here, bathing and enveloping (say, womb-like), with a hammering echo (not really the Yellow Submarine, rather “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, as all the Neptune crew carefully and as one, listens to the weird hammering against the ship outsides : there IS something out there, scratching, trying to open, to intrude ; flicks of “Night of the Hunter” come to mind : it’s a siege, there’s a presence outside, waiting).
Celer
Zigzag
SPEKK KK 027 CD (2014)
Elegantly dressed in its tapestry-like thick cardboard sleeve (a delicate Op’Art vertigo), ZIGZAG is one relatively ample piece of trembling drones, weightlessly varying from flute-like ascents to motor-like tremors. Eerie, tense and trip-y in a way that never seem to touch ground. Floating and drifting could have suited such a circular tapestry, save for that eerie overtone, without displaying any menace ever, though : actually, a listener could feel like standing at the center of those ascending/descending circles of variously tuned and pitched blows of air. Rings forming a multicolored cyclone in slow motion, all softened while incredibly loud and sustained. With a stubborn tension carried through the reverberating dynamics of the rings. Beautifully far from neutral as an experience. This takes you on a 49 minutes privileged ride amidst a turbulent timezone. CELER is (now) WILL LONG.
Cenk Ergün
Nana
USA CARRIER RECORDS 025 CD (2014)
Bang on a bottle ? Bottleneck music ? CENK ERGÜN composes here with chiming percussions in both ascent and descent. Sleep-walking though careful, we drift our way through a forest of chimes, glassful sounds communicating via obstinate clusters, then meadows of more distinct speech, almost articulated phonemes. Silence and resonance : it speaks in space; here, more than ever, the sounds define the space : opening bubbles, forming speech. Very exciting music, played by SO PERCUSSION, “PROXIMITY” sounds like musicians enjoying the noise of their instruments, and the repetitive drive they get from it. There’s an awe, as they stop and seem to listen to what they’ve just set free. The resonance ensuing sometimes verges on the feedback. It had to be chamber music, what else. “CELLO PEACE”, played by JOAN JEANRENAUD displays a very physical composition (for cello) expressed four times, each of the four layers being purposedly laid upon one another : four interpretations of the same structure, in conversation; a soft way to dissect, in order to expose the organism of said composition, and its muscular details. Anatomy in the boudoir, attended by a selectively chosen audience.