Werner Dafeldecker here with one of two new items for the Room40 label. It seemed like only yesterday when this radical Austrian experimenter had formed his Paroxysm group to release that self-titled cassette in Berlin. The music contained hints about Werner’s compositional methods, also in evidence on today’s Neural (RM4191), but so elusive are his ideas that I’m barely able to register them. The first long piece, the title track, is in fact a collaborative effort relying on the cellos of Nicholas Bussmann and Judith Hamann, plus the double bass of John Heilbron who joins our man Dafeldecker on that instrument. It’s something to do with how “neural networks develop a memory”, a situation that arises when information is repeated and transmitted…if you imagine a quartet propelled for 28:12 mins on this notion, you might see the phenomenon manifesting itself in the music. I like the idea that an “acoustic stamp” can be put onto the brain, even if I don’t fully grasp what it means. More plainly, the music here is all about low-register vibrations and something unusual happening with microtones too. It takes a rare mind to perceive these things, let alone realise them into some sort of coherent musical form. Werner Dafeldecker doesn’t compose, but he does (on this occasion) relish the construction of a piece using “alien material as the structuring element”. And then when he’s all finished, he removes that structure, leaving some sort of ghostly shell behind. Prepare for a long stretch of intense alien-osity, heavy on the sub-bass acoustic drone.
‘Tape 231’ is likewise predicated on that non-existent invisible grid, a set of hidden struts, props and rectangles that the musicians have to negotiate, or are guided by, but we in the audience can’t hear them in the finished product. It’s the act of engagement that’s relevant, in this case the woodwinds of Lucio Capece; Werner Dafeldecker reprocessed or otherwise reworked on recordings of the Capece long-form tones and multiphonic sounds emanating from the bell of the bass clarinet. Werner claims he was guided by an old cassette tape of his filled with “peculiar percussive sounds”, which was indeed present in some way at the start of the process, but has now been erased from it all as surely as melted snow. Compositional practices such as duration and density were determined by this tape, deployed in ways that would outfox even the most determined adherent of graphical scores or other modernistic tools. I like the way that Dafeldecker speaks about these hard-to-grasp ideas in such a dry, matter of fact, manner. Kinda process-heavy, but the process is something that works on people and their behaviours – both creators and listeners – and isn’t just another way of reworking existing recordings, which is a more commonplace practice.
If both of these pieces are demonstrations of the “structural removal” technique, then they can be counted as successes, even if the results are quite severe and testing. From 3rd May 2023.