By Stuart Broomer
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.
