Andreas Trobollowitsch has surfaced here a number of times over the years, to varying degrees of success with his experiments and sound-art exploits. It’s fair to say he can’t be pinned down or easily pigeon-holed, sometimes leaning towards a particular form of electro-acoustic composition, sometimes associated with art gallery installations.
On today’s record Truba (FUTURA RESISTENZA RESLP030), there was indeed an installation, and you can see photos of this unlikely erection on the covers of the LP. From what I can make out, it was a gigantic rotating device fitted with pipes. On the platform of this roundabout-like machine sat two trumpet players, Alex Kranabetter and Martin Eberie; as they slowly rotated on this uncanny fairground ride of artistic imagination, their sounds might pass through openings and thence be conveyed to an audience through the long pipes. This took place in 2020 in the Kleiner Wasserspeicher in Berlin, but what’s ended up on the record is from a 2022 recording made in Vienna at the Zacherlfabrik, possibly an edited version of what was presented to the audience.
The writer Hans-Jürgen Hauptmann was won over 100%: he regards all of this as an advanced form of audio-sculpture, and suggests the machine was a scaled-up version of a record player, leading him to muse on the nature of what’s actually happening when we drop the needle on a favourite disc. “Resulting fluctuations in air pressure create pockets of turbulence in space-time,” is his proposal, of which one outcome is “portals into different dimensions”. Truba doesn’t quite live up to this fanciful account, but it’s a reasonably interesting work of process art; despite presence of trumpets, it’s nothing to do with jazz, and might not even have anything to do with music. Andreas Trobollowitsch, who is credited with the concept and the installation – and even the composition of the pieces, which do bear traces of some pre-planned shapes, or designs – deserves credit for thinking big, yet the finished result doesn’t convey any sense of scale, is not sufficiently integrated with the environment, nor does it reveal any major surprises about the nature of acoustics and sounds travelling down pipes, the latter a fruitful line of enquiry for American minimalists who had read the theories of Helmholtz.
Still, I do like the black-and-white photo on the back cover, which suggested to my cruel mind a device which might have existed in a Victorian prison yard or workhouse – similar to the treadmill or other such banned instruments of punishment. Of course the record sounds nothing like that! (09/05/2024)