The world of electroacoustic improv, of which the label
Erstwhile has been a major documenter, tends toward understatement (if
that's not an overstatement): wide open spaces scattered with lightly
touched instruments veiled by sparse electronic scrims. Sounds tend to move
at glacial paces, requiring, yet never demanding, close attention. As such,
experiments in this sound world tend to be brittle affairs, at times even
grating if you don't allow yourself to fully submerge.
Wrapped
Islands, however, is a very different affair. The meeting of Viennese
sound sculptor Christian Fennesz (heard here on acoustic guitar as well as
his usual electronics) with the quartet Polwechsel makes this a virtual big
band in a scene that tends to favor solo and duo performance. Having five
performers on the session helps to explain the breadth of the sound, but
clearly the ensemble was going for something specific. Fennesz, one of the
two players credited with 'computer', previously built a disc-length piece
from Beach Boys samples. And Beach Boy Brian Wilson's rich sounds hover here
as well; Wrapped Islands is gorgeously lush. It's wet and sunny, slow
but compelling.
Polwechsel are essentially an acoustic group.
Although they all employ electronics and effects, the four (saxophonist John
Butcher, Burkhard Stangl on acoustic and electric guitars, Werner
Dafeldecker on double bass and acoustic guitar and cellist Michael Moser)
don't mask their instrumentation, even if the end result is a thick, tight
weave. Sounds of strings and sax undercut the hums and whirs that hold the
music together, lending familiar voices to the abstraction. The language
might not be easily learned, but here it is beautifully spoken.
As
Instrument-driven as they are, Polwechsel aren't particularly melodious. On
eh, Stangl affords himself the opportunity to play. His
finger-picking on the acoustic guitar speaks in paragraphs rather then brief
phrases, and where Polwechsel avoid contrast at any cost, Stangl's guitar
clashes with, or is crashed against, Dieb 13's "portable computer" and
turntables (including, even, a gramophone). Dieb 13 pushes static intrusions
through Stangl's slow, Faheyesque lines.
The occasional shard of
melody does slip from the turntables, though most of Dieb 13's work here is
given over to static and needle pops and the machine noise of his
instrument. But his gramophone does let loose forgotten strands from decades
past, pulling his scratchscapes into more familiar, or at least referential,
terrain. eh is not music for the masses; in fact, it has barely any mass of
its own. But the dialogues contained, while spoken softly, are smart.
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