Ernst Karel, Annette Krebs
Falter 1-5
Signal to Noise
The tracks on both of these CDs are numbered, not named, so we’ll take their measure first as quantities. All four of these musicians have experience with free improvisation as well as past and present involvements with conventionally scored music. Three of them (Block, Bruckmann, Karel) have lived in Chicago, although only Block does now; the sole non-American, Krebs, lives in Berlin. Bruckmann and Karel currently inhabit opposite American coasts, which doesn’t stop them from playing together in an electro-acoustic improv duo, EKG, that sounds nothing like either of these records. While both of these albums could be characterized as electroacoustic compositions, that doesn’t get you very far in grasping the how, what, or why of either disc. They’re both devilishly hard to pin down; even when you can tell exactly what the sound is that you’re hearing, it’s as hard to know why it’s there as it is to dispute the rightness of its presence. Block and Bruckmann worked on their album for five years, commencing when the latter moved to San Francisco in 2003 and carrying on as a remote collaboration save for one studio session shortly before its completion. The music is predominantly acoustic, but the most conventionally instrumental passages are also the most artificial-sounding because of the ways they have been layered and juxtaposed. Massed and manipulated, Bruckmann’s double reeds are at the head of the mix, sometimes as blown instruments, sometime as tactile sources of sound. Most Block recordings teem with the sounds of the outdoors, so it’s tempting to attribute the field recordings that contain Bruckmann’s tones to her, but you never know. What more certain is the richness and depth of this aptly named recording. Falter 1-5, on the other hand, is quite overtly electric. The bumps, buzzes, and hums that issue from Karel’s analog electronics sound like voltage itself, and not terribly different from the small crackles and hisses that Krebbs obtains from her electric guitar. The piece was realized more quickly than Teem, but it is a very considered arrangement of spontaneously made sounds. It was recorded in 2006, when Karel lived for a spell in Berlin, so it predates his recent solo CD Heard Laboratories, which is composed of recorded, unprocessed lab sounds, and perhaps it’s a precursor; like that record, it makes you feel like you’re eavesdropping on machines rather than hearing played instruments. This frees the listener to appreciate the sounds themselves, to ponder their textures and the way they start and end rather than get hung up on the actions that made them.
The Wire
Review to appear here once I find it and type it up!
