Falter Bramnk
Music For Luminous Background
POLAND SUBLIME RETREAT SR022 CD (2024)
French composer here with his “glass and crystal” record.
This fellow has been active since the 1990s in the diverse fields of theatre, dance, art installations, and (more recently) cinema soundtrack engineering, as well as finding time for a fascinating array of compositions in the electro-acoustic and field recording modes. Plus he’s reckoned as an improviser, a DJ, creator of sonic diaries, and one who may even create a “sound portrait” of a fellow artist at the drop of a suitcase if requested. He made a record Glassical Music for Circum-Disc in 2017, which did indeed use glass bottles and tumblers, but it was also about the actions of water and water vapour, including such basic elements as air and condensation.
Today’s Music For Luminous Background might be reckoned as a sequel to that item, except now he’s dispensed with the water and air, and all we have are these understated crystalline tones. Originally the works here were scored for his buddies in the Muzzix Collective, and intended for live performance. There’s probably some evidence of that side of the project on ‘Verreformance’ (the short final track) where the crystals and glass objects are played by Barbara Dang, Peter Orins, Gordon Pym, Sam Bodart, and Christian Pruvost. It’s also historically interesting to see the re-emergence of the ‘Crystal Baschet’ here on two tracks, ‘Cobalt’ and ‘Larmes’; the Crystal Baschet is one of the musical sculptures devised by Bernard and François Baschet. These Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet have a respectable history in French experimental music, dating back to 1955 when the brothers teamed up with Jacques and Yvonne Lasry, and from that union a number of fascinating LPs emerged on the BAM label in France in the early 1960s.
Falter Bramnk’s work follows this lineage, and although it’s tempting to cite the Glass World of Anna Lockwood at this point, that record came a bit later than the Baschets (1970) and, although she too used glass objects, she arrived at a completely different sound-world than what we hear on this delicate record. Bramnk also produced the photos for the cover art, very fine low-key studies of the overlapping shapes and planes of glass bottles. (15/11/2024)