Falter Bramnk is a French composer who has branched out from his formal classical training into a multitude of roles – now composing music for theatre, video, film, and contemporary dance groups. He also plays in the Grand Orchestre de Muzzix and has his own radio show, Opposition De Phase. His Glassical Music (CIRCUM-DISC / HELIX LX011) however isn’t so much of a formal composition as it is a phonography/sound art experiment; all the sounds we hear were generated from recycled glass bottles, and his actions when he was rinsing them in the sink with hot water. The recordings he made were mixed and edited to some extent. He regards all this as an interesting confluence of “water, air and glass” and finds “specific timbric textures and continuous rhythmic patterns” emerging from these microscopic events. Plastic or metal containers may also have been admitted into this conceptual framework, though it’s not entirely clear if this was the case; but the fundamental approach is the same. It might be worth comparing this record to the famous Glass World (1970) by Annea Lockwood; she arrived at results that are wholly different to Bramnk. Bramnk’s sounds are still quiet and hard-to-discern, but he’s evidently more interested in internal rhythms, to the extent that most of this record sounds like a sequencer or beat box on the frizz, in desperate need of circuit repair. The watery dimension does make its way to the surface more than once, and one first hearing this “blind” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the sound of frogs, crickets or mosquitoes fetched from some swampy zone. The cover design (also by Bramnk) of many overlaid images suggests something of the kaleidoscopic nature of his method and the results. From 19th September 2017.
