On Ground (MIKROTON CD 65), we have an all-star teamup of EAI musicians performing two long half-hour tracks…there’s Günter Müller with his iPods, Kurt Liedwart on electronics, and Norbert Möslang with his famed cracked everyday-electronics. For nearly 20 years, Müller operated his label For4Ears our of Switzerland and it used to produce a considerable number of releases of this sort of music, quite often featuring himself duetting with Möslang; I’m sure that around 2005 I must have felt myself sated with the over-familiar sensation of these teeming, saturated digital drones, where ions of sound seemed to be dancing like microscopic flots in a gaseous sea of sound. Today’s spin of these 2017 recordings, made in the Ground Hodynka gallery in Russia, leaves me with a much better feeling however; either the music has improved, or I’m feeling better disposed towards it.
It’s still all very maximal, with non-stop continuous noise and sound filling every available space, and mostly made from non-musical abstracted electronic humming, but within this wide canvas the musicians find every opportunity to add interesting surfaces, gestural marks and micro-events with their respective set-ups. At the same time, they evidently must take care not to disrupt the hypnotic mood of the overall sway and swim, and so remain attuned to advancing the total effort. The time passes in a most unexpected way as we explore these semi-underground caverns in the sky. From 30th October 2018.