Large-scale avant electro-acoustic composition ahoy. The sound of Two Into One (Τα Αμφότερα Εν) (ZEITKRATZER PROUCTIONS zkr 1102) starts out so full-on, orchestral and near-chaotic it’s almost hard to believe it was produced from a single piano.
Reinhold Friedl and Costis Drygianakis have gone overboard with prepared piano methods – the notorious screws in the stringboard still proving popular – plus ebows, mallets, close-mic placement, and a variety of recording machines, including low-grade cassette player and dictaphone. The process is evidently so important here that all six panels of the digipak release are devoted to showing us, in seductive black-and-white close-up photography, some of the details of how the music was realised. I see the German half of the act is there looking stern and serious behind his laptop hooked up to a mixing desk, and for those who crave more such documentary images, look to the booklet for more generous scads.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it than just the set-up – a Bluthner grand piano lies at the heart of it – as these two musicians have been circulating ideas over the wires since they first brushed antennae in Thessaloniki in 2017. It seems Friedl became quite the fan and collected not a few records by the Greek maestro, hopefully including some rarities on the EDO label (Costis Drygianakis has been making music since 1987 and is reckoned to be a master of tape media and computers). While it’s tempting to look for another Greek titan to step into the shoes of Xenakis, the comparison wouldn’t quite be valid; while I never heard Drygianakis’s music before, what I’m sensing on today’s long-form outing is a concern with simplicity of means, and that’s quite some way from the mathematical complexity and layered density of Iannis Xenakis. Even so Two Into One achieves rich results from its simple set-up, due not only to the sound-processing efforts of the Greek genius, but also hopefully many careful hours spent considering the placement of the mics, the choice of the preparations for the piano. That piano’s soundboard has now had its doors flung wide, every corner of its grand space explored as surely as the endless depths of a subterranean cavern.
I’m not always a huge fan of single-track one-hour CDs, but this is one statement that makes the most of the wide-screen canvas. The exciting roaring-rumble avalanche of the opening is uncharacteristic, perhaps, but keep listening and you will feel the chill of the night air with stars appearing overhead one by one – that’s my way of accounting for the sparse notes and sound-events dotted around in a charged, atmospheric tableau. (19/12/2024)