The great Burkhard Beins has surfaced in these pages with tremendous performances in groups such as Polwechsel, Trio Sowari, and Perlonex, plus many other instances of collaborative works, many of them documented on the former Mikroton Records label, often associated with minimal playing and percussion. The trend of all these Beins records shows how he’s a forward-thinking musician, doing a lot to expand the free improvisation bag through his open-minded approaches, plus his adventurous way of playing.
Today’s record is a table-top electronic synth and effects pedals thing, credited to Sawt Out with Tony Elieh, and called Machine Learning (BOCIAN NO NUMBER). The players are Burkhard Beins, Mazen Kerbaj, Michael Vorfeld, and guest player Tony Elieh on electric bass guitar and electronics. On the table, there’s radio sets, amplified objects, toys, light bulbs, analog synths and crackle synths, samples and switches…in fine, not too far away from the performing situations so well documented on Mikroton (and sometimes associated with Miguel A Garcia, erikm, Ignaz Schick and others). Loving the very dense and “busy” surface of these nine pieces, but it’s the assured synth playing of Beins and Kerbaj that stands out for me, so bold and inventive that we must put it on the same level as Thomas Lehn (or perhaps Jérôme Noetinger, except he tends to do it with Revox tape recorders and radio signals). I feel like I should hear more by Sawt Out, but turns out they haven’t been massively prolific and in fact this is their second release since 2018’s self-titled album. Mazen Kerbaj was born in Beirut but came to Berlin, and I see he’s made a number of collaborative records with various German modernists – Hautzinger, Zach, Ulher, Dorner, and others. Plus he’s a comic artist too. German player Vorfeld also happens to be a percussionist – he heard him here on Karpf in 2010, but he has a long list of improvising releases from 1995 onwards. As for Elieh, he happens to be a sometime member of the Johnny Kafta Anti-Vegetarian Orchestra, along with Kerbaj.
With so many varied and noisy sound-creating devices to play with – just look at the picture inside – it’s always impressive to me as an outsider how the musicians manage to sustain focus without allowing everything to dissolve away in a broth of electronic soup, but the ideas and the determination are very strong. One would like to know more about how the light bulbs contribute to the overall direction, but maybe their lightwaves are being transmuted into sound somehow, or they’re being used as switching devices, or we’re simply hearing the amplified noise of their secret humming as they repose stately in their sockets. If I’m honest, only Elieh’s guest bass-playing lets the side down, his conventional rhythmic figures suggesting he’s hoping the rest of the band will wise up and break into a funky sweat instead of dabbling with avant noise. From 14th November 2022.