This three-LP set is a dive into a substantial body of work – 1 hour, 57 minutes and 29 seconds – drawn from performances at Morphine Raum in Berlin in March and April 2023. Each of the eight duos is represented by a single track, ranging in length from 7:59 to 21:08. It might also be a dive into semantics, and how one might describe what Austrian percussionist and composer Burkhard Beins does. Yes, he’s a percussionist and, more so, an improviser, for here he ranges far afield, playing strings and electronics. If one were to suggest a similarly engaged musician, Eddie Prévost or the late Sven-Åke Johansson would immediately come to mind, and surely there might be more precise terms for what they do. A percussionist hits things and an improviser does things spontaneously as circumstances invite, suggest or require.
To distinguish, I prefer to think of Beins, Prévost and Johansson as materialists and relationists, artists working in the sonic qualities of material and relationships among sounds, both the ones they choose to make and those of others with whom they work. Perhaps an element of the metaphysical is also present, the interactive transformations of materiality and mind.
Beins has been in the vanguard of European improvised music since the mid-nineties when he joined the pioneering new music ensemble Polwechsel, a group that has now been integrating methodologies of composition and improvisation for over thirty years. In that time Beins has also collaborated with numerous other significant improvisers, including Johansson, Lotte Anker, John Butcher, Keith Rowe and Splitter Orchester.
Eight Duos is drawn from a series of performances in which Beins performed sets with two different musicians. Four of the duos will each fill a side of an LP, four others will split two sides.
That fascination with particular sounds and their interactions defines Beins’ approach here: for each of the duos he chose to play a different instrument or instruments or a selection of instruments from his drum kit, extending his usual range to include electric bass and a host of electronics, while his shifting partners engage a broad range of sound sources, from minimal to very dense. At times a radical minimalism arises; at other times the selection of instruments will be sufficiently mysterious to take on elements of musique concrète. For the concluding Transmission , Marta Zapparoli brings antennae, receivers and tape machines with Beins employing analog synthesizers, walkie talkies and samples, the two creating a robot universe of sound.
On a brief note on the Bandcamp page, Beins explains, “On a conceptual level, the idea was that I would play with different instruments or with a different set-up each time in order to present the breadth of my current work.” The broad range of that work is also apparent in the highly distinct collaborators with whom he works here.
The first collaboration, Expansion (19’55”), is an exercise in a radical minimalism, with Andrea Neumann employing the inside of a piano and a mixing board, Beins restricting himself to an amplified cymbal and a bass drum. It’s a work of subtle minimalism, many of the sounds are not immediately attributable, whether scraped or struck metal, wood or even the shell of a drum; at the same time, the variety and breadth of sounds can suggest a group much larger than a duo. Complex, rhythmic phrases emerge, literally linear, but distributed between the instruments’ remixed sounds, rendering the acoustic, electronic and altered materials at times indistinguishable. A continuous melody emerges, sounding like it might be coming from a power tool. The work – sometimes stark, sometimes dense – possesses a durable mystery, arising between the amplified and the acoustic, the scraped, the tuned and the broad, ambiguous vocabularies of action.
The two shorter pieces of LP 1, side B, are studies in contrast, featuring the most radically reduced instrumentation and the most dense of the acoustic performances. Extraction (7'53”) has Michael Renkel credited with playing strings and percussion, Beins percussion and strings. Renkel’s strings consist of a zither and a string stretched across cardboard, Beins is apparently playing an acoustic guitar and other percussion instruments.
It's engaging continuous music with a delicate dissonance that reflects a long-standing collaboration. In 2020 Renkel and Beins released a 19-minute digital album entitled Delay 1989, recorded 31 years before, each playing numerous instruments.
Excursion, with Quentin Tolimieri playing grand piano and Beins engaging his drum kit, is at the opposite end of the sound spectrum, substantial instruments played with significant force. Tolimieri is an insistently rhythmic pianist, beginning with rapid runs and driven clusters and chords, moving increasingly to repeated and forceful iterations of single chords, combining with Beins’ fluid drumming across his kit and cymbals in a powerful statement that approaches factory-strength free jazz.
LP2, Side A is similarly subdivided. Unleash has Andrea Ermke on mini discs and samples with Beins on analog synthesizers and samples. Shifting, continuous, liquid sounds predominate, suggesting an improvisatory art that is literally environmental (traffic flowing over a bridge perhaps). Here there are prominent bird sounds as well, further drawing one into this elemental world of mini-discs and samples, a natural world formed, however, entirely in its relationships to technology. A door shuts… then a silence… then the piece resumes: bells, struck metal percussion, rustling paper, air, muffled conversation…
Unfold returns to the world of the grand piano and drum kit with pianist Anaïs Tuerlinckx joining Beins in yet another dimension, echoing isolated tones from prepared piano and scratched strings returning us to another zone of the ambiguated world initially introduced with Expansion and Andrea Neumann, though here there’s the suggestion of glass chimes along with the whistling highs from rubbed and plucked upper-register strings, matched as well with muted roars and uncertain grinds.
Unlock, LP2, Side B, initiating a series of three extended works, presents a duet with trumpeter Axel Dörner in which Beins plays snare drums and objects. It may be the most intense experience of music as interiority here. If the trumpet has a mythological lineage back to the walls of Jericho, Dörner’s approach is the antithesis of that tradition, focussed instead on the instrument’s secret voices, at times here suggesting tiny birds, recently hatched and discreetly testing their untried voices. Beins restricts himself to snare drum and objects, often exploring light rustles, as if the snare is merely being switched on and off. Sometimes there are lower-pitched grinding noises, any attribution here unsure. Sometimes it feels like the sounds of packing up, so quietly executed it might be impossible. When the piece ends, one is willing to keep listening. Trumpet? Snare drum? It feels like air and feathers.
The two side-length works that occupy the third LP find Beins leaving his percussion instruments behind. Transformation, with Tony Elieh, has both musicians playing electric basses and electronics, generating feedback and exploring string techniques that complement and expand the subtle explorations of the bass guitars’ continuing walls of droning feedback with whistling harmonics and burbling rhythmic patterns. There’s a sustained passage in which bright, bell-like highs and shifting pitches float over a continuous rhythmic pattern from one of the electric basses, further illumined by bright high-frequencies, only to conclude with low-pitched interference patterns and bass strings that can suggest the echoing hollow of a tabla drum amid droning electronics and querulous rising and falling pitch bends, until concluding on an ambiguous sound and a continuous rhythmic pattern.
The final Transmission is a wholly electronic, layered collage with Marta Zapparoli using antennas, receivers and tape machines, and Beins employing analog synthesizers, walkie talkies and samples. Each sound source seems fundamentally complex – echo, the hiss of static, the semi-lost sound seeping through interference, a factory enjoying itself on its own time, blurring voices of the human intruders until it suggests the voices of distant generals muffled into the meaningless, suggesting invitation into the work’s own dreams, its feedback modulations hinting at travel into deep space, a world of echoes, percussion evident as isolated crackle. It’s the sound of an alternate experience, the acoustic world disappearing into the alien beauty of technology’s sonic detritus.
Start anywhere, with any track. The music will transcend the inevitable linearity of its presentation. Can two people make that much music out of so little? Can two people make and manage that sheer quantity of sound. The works await.
0 comments:
Post a Comment