It’s not so long ago since Bernard Parmegiani proposed La Creation Du Monde in 1986 – a lovely piece of electro-acoustic composition now reckoned by many as an essential and important piece in the field of classical / academic musique concrète. Today, we have La Fin Des Terres (ZEITKRATZER PRODUCTIONS zkrll01 / BROKEN SILENCE 05784) – a creaking meister-stroke which I read as a statement of finality, cued by the titles on the two discs which use the letters Z and Omega – but it’s possible that our two major creators, Reinhold Friedl and Kasper T. Topelitz aren’t making music for the apocalypse, but rather implying they’re exploring unknown worlds and strange new galaxies, sailing out to the edge of the world to fall off the side and be eaten by monsters. So Parmegiani’s globe might be safe for the time being.
Friedl and Topelitz are doing it with just piano and electric bass, although swathes of amplifier hum and other evil fizz do seem to swirl in with the rising tides, and the entire suite extends over two hours in a non-stop performance of deathly slowness, informed by a fatalistic torpidity that’s guaranteed to put the listener on ice as they freeze our bone marrow, using sophisticated hospital equipment, by inches. The “composition” word is getting bandied about a lot in connection with this record, and undoubtedly both these gifted Europeans have earned that accolade in their many endeavours, but La Fin Des Terres is almost entirely predicated on the performance – specifically the simple interaction between these two instruments, but after a bout of listening you’ll start to think the piano is the size of a house and the bass is a coffin for a woolly mammoth. It does seem to have some effect of stretching out dimensions, but the one they are most interested in is that of “time” – “the music is clearly built on a double thought of the architecture of time,” we are told, “the creation, disappearance and mutation of textures…”, which seems to be a way of expressing something about the sheer formlessness of these wretched burrs, these cold piano stabs, these non-musical shapes, these menacing lower-register tones, and above all the sense of slowly marching into the abyss, to the tempo of Reinhold Friedl’s left hand. In like manner, the six monochrome images on the digipak depict a land without boundaries, a sprawl of contours and surfaces, too vast to be understood or encompassed.
Well, all of this would be just grand if there was a bit more tension and vif to the music, or if the duo just cut loose and exploded into horrifying, bone-crushing noise, but they take the exact opposite path – restraint, cool, aloofness, are just some of the watchwords binding them in as they undertake their gloomy task of repainting the continents in various shades of grey, and rather than build to an orgasmic climax across the cosmic sky, they prefer to wind it in even tighter and spiral downwards to a nameless grave. Still, this kind of stilted free-improv is an interesting move for Friedl, slightly uncharacteristic of this meticulous control-freak fellow who needs to spend months preparing elaborate impossible scores before he can execute them using lasers and sewing-machines and protractors. French / Polish Kasper T Toeplitz is now, I see, considered to be an important electroacoustic new music interpreter (e.g. Radigue, Niblock), but he started out as a brutal noise guy in the late 1990s, when he worked with Karkowski, Z’EV, Vomir, and Ottavi dishing out nine types of punishment from his whacking stick.
I take heart that it was recorded at Art Zoyd studios, although the actual band Art Zoyd would have really made a meal of this “theme” if they’d tackled it in the 1980s, and would have delivered it in a fraction of the time. From 15th September 2023.