Looper (Martin Kuchen / Nikos Veliotis / Ingar Zach)

Dying Sun

Label: Another Timbre Country: UK

"The trio Looper consists of Nikos Veliotis, Martin Küchen, and Ingar Zach and their Dying Sun (at38, co-released with Cathnor as Cath012), omits any reference to the instruments played, though one will hear some sounds readily attributed to Veliotis's usual cello, Küchen's reeds, and Zach's percussion, the latter an umbrella term that might take in much that's heard here.

The bulk of the CD is devoted to a near half-hour piece called "Grand Redshift," as dense as it is quiet, with storms of sound that first assemble at the point of bare perception. At times a repeated oscillation will reveal an underlying instrumental identity as saxophone or cello, but the idea of disguise doesn't seem relevant. In part, it's the reduction of musical materials, the concentration on an isolated sound (call it scratch or tap or "extended technique"), the intense focusing on the timbre bit in which the personality of the sound and the chance polyrhythm with other sounds is paramount. The use of sustained sounds and heightened resonance may create a sense of the outdoors and there are points where "Grand Redshift" resembles a soundscape composition I've heard using a wharf, rather than music that has begun with conventional musical instruments (or ended: the envelope of an industrial scrape eventually reveals a cello). There are frequently repeated rhythmic patterns here that suggest Zach has assumed the conventional role of a drummer, but they also seem mechanical (the rhythms of clocks and sewing machines) or accidental, a sustained drip perhaps, including a long passage of accelerating polyrhythms in which rate and relations multiply.

In part the achievement here is that a group of musicians go beyond the notion of the collective to suggest the sustained coherence of a place or a culture."-Stuart Broomer, Point of Departure

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