An Extra Silence in Nickelsdorf: Day 3
Creating an Extra Silence: The 34th Konfrontationen Festival at the Jazzgalerie, Nickelsdorf
Day 3
The festival was the 3rd weekend in July, per the usual. I started this report 3 months later. I wanted to absorb, I needed to be absorbed.
Saturday began with another early trip out to the Kleylehof to set up the bar again as I would be helping prepare and sell drinks for the afternoon concerts. Lick--it's what's on your tongue. I may have had a spritz myself. The duet between Christof Kurzmann on laptop/electronics (running a free, open-source MaxMSP piece of software he calls "ppooll") and Sofia Jernberg on voice/tools appeared to be more the performance of a composition than a total improvisation. I can't emphasize enough the quality of the electronic sounds Kurzmann generates: they have a dynamism and warmth that astonishes. The way I heard this duet, it seemed like whatever sounds or words Jernberg sang, Kurzmann accompanied with the sounds of her internal life as she sang. Underbelly maelstrom soft torrent, hot inside the head, gentle melodic sway wobble, milk's thirst for coagulation, the most friendly dancing. Kurzmann's love of melody and variety of sonic palette emphasized each of Jernberg's utterances: little metallic techno beats, underbrush clatters, an end-of-videogame-wipeout blurlp, birdcall whistling, squeaking wood--the timbres wouldn't stop. Jernberg's natural tone is that of submerged lumber, with it's rounded edges, exquisite surfaces, and knotty grottoes. The content of what she sang was a large part of this performance: "Let's go…out of bounds…waiting for the love that blessed break…the big hush…can't get in tune can you…forget about peace, go for attunement…you want a little bit of the breathtaking?…would it hurt?…will it?…no more leaders, no more idols, only beggars…" That wasn't the sequence or all of what she sang, but these were the topics flying through the room. I also wrote down "everything is breathtaking", but I'm not sure if she sang that, or if I just happened to finally realize it.
A defining moment of the set was when Kurzmann laid down a static wash and Jernberg absolutely screamed on top of it–the static was impeccably, fragilely, diminutively balanced with the scream, just underneath it, nuzzling it, not competing with it or even trying to be equal with it, just a sidekick of static. It made the scream that much more emphatic, and quelled.
Backyard myoplasm. The instrument whose natural tone I am most attracted to is the clarinet. So the clarinet trio of Paed Conca, Michael Thieke and Hans Koch–known as Porta Chiusa–seemed like just what I would love to have join me for an afternoon. But while I am familiar with and love the more extreme kind of clarinet playing exemplified by this band, their choice to play along in a dark room with a couple of experimental films left me wanting more: more clarinet, more light, more ritual, more attunement with the time and the space. The first film was black and white, showing a blindfolded guy painting a window that was shaped like a door, split-screen so you see the front and back of the window. The music they made to accompany these images was cave sonar, subdued tightrope walking along edges of pitch, grease on eel for the fire and a bright but quick flame. And in the film, he continued painting over the window. The sounds were compelling even if not invigorating and I had wine-flavored chewing gum because of a hopping insect on flaking gray concrete and the sun snaked through the room as curtains were brushed-aside for entry and exit.
The second film they composed a piece for was a documentary of a deportation at the Zürich airport by Giorgio Andreoli featuring no dialogue and only anonymous shots of legs, stairs, hallways, waiting rooms, etc. interspersed with black screens containing spaced-out letters and phrases relating to "borders" in various languages. The film directed my thinking too much, and in an uncomfortably dogmatic and controlling way, as the music then became a soundtrack of interminable and ambiguous waiting, which seemed like a harsh relegation it didn't deserve.
An excellent documentary of the festival by Slovenian television (with subtitles in German but some dialogue in English and plenty of amazing concert footage from throughout the festival) features sections of both these films as well as commentary by Conca on Porta Chiusa's work. Also, plenty of people have posted videos of a bunch of the sets from this year's festival on YouTube (look for 34th Konfrontationen Nickelsdorf), but so much of the ambience is lost that I am not inclined to recommend a look for any other purpose than a slight glimpse into the Jazzgalerie world.
Speaking of slight glimpses, this was the fifth year that "sound art" was a component of the festival. I have a problem with "sound art.” Not because it is bad to consider sound as art, but because I think music already is art. Not only that, but it seems like a term wielded by elite institutions (and elitist individuals) to designate a higher quality of artistic merit to sounds that fit in galleries and museums than to sounds produced from a person on a stage. People like Caleb Kelly and Susan Philipsz and articles like this inform my skepticism of the term and my disgust at the overall ignorance of sound art champions to the rest of what is happening in creative music. (They refer to creative musicians as "honk-tweeters" and "dial twiddlers" for example.) But even looking at someone like Frank Zappa, who would never be considered a "sound artist," I see someone who engaged in radical social commentary, incorporated a deep knowledge of the history of music (Varèse, Mingus, Stravinsky, Howlin' Wolf, etc.) into his writing and playing, and used elaborate theatricality on stage as a way to enhance and emphasize his compositions. That sure seems like someone who used sound as art to me.
Just to finish this digression about the attempted gallery-and-museumification of evocative and provocative sounds, I'd like to point out that it's not impossible for institutions to address advances in music and the panoply of the world's sounds in a way that isn't condescending to musicians or sound. The Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona's Radio Web Macba features thousands of programs investigating creative sound in all its richness and history. (Chris Cutler's "Probes" series, now with 5 episodes, is an extraordinarily enlightening investigation into how various technologies inserted themselves directly into the developments of Western music beginning in the late nineteenth-century. And Felix Kubin’s curatorial project Parasol Elecktroniczny, which explores contemporary Eastern European underground music in Estonia, Latvia and the Czech Republic, are two examples of some of the excellent work being commissioned and broadcast through this institution.)
The "sound art" at Nickelsdorf itself had nothing wrong with it; I just had to air my offense at the term and what it seems to want to represent. Sivan Eldar and Anna Adler made a nice sculpture of leaves suspended ever-so-daintily via fishing line over various small piles of ash. Assorted fans blew the leaves around into the piles of ash and made tiny scraping and hissing sounds with their edges. Robert Mathy mounted a bunch of small metal spikes to surfaces all over the room; these were activated at surprising intervals to tap and hit various materials. He writes, "Crucial for the tone colour are the materials existing in the room. The score adapts every time in every room where the installation is exhibited; so every time the work has its distinctive sound qualities." Too often for my taste, this 'specificity is king' mentality dominates instances of "sound art," as if just because something exists it is automatically worth paying attention to. Actually, now that I write that as if it's not true, maybe I see that it is. Maybe the fact of existence, itself, is enough to warrant importance. The problem is that I've already experienced too many works that iterate and reiterate this idea.
On to the evening concerts. You breathe it in, you expel it: you give back a little of you either way; in comes the ether, out goes the ether. And possibly a little essence. Lawrence "Butch" Morris passed away this year, and the first set, while the sun was still out, featured his longtime colleague and friend J.A. Deane leading an incredible stage full of musicians in a memorial conduction. With Hamid Drake, Paul Lovens and Tony Buck all on drums and percussion, plus Els Vandeweyer on marimba, there was plenty of rhythm to be found in the glissando of passing. I felt my own father's passing more deeply during this set than any other, probably because it was a memorial already, but also because it was the kind of memorial Butch and my dad would have appreciated: boisterous and serious, focused and exalted, full of smiling faces and energized bodies both on stage and in the audience. It also started so solemnly, with a series of bass clarinet trills by Hans Koch and gradually intruding doublebass bowing from George Cremashi and Joëlle Léandre, plus a perfect hue of fading sunshine behind the stage, that a certain tranquility and hard-won peace-with-death permeated the air. (Throughout the festival my great Romanian buddies in JADD kept teasing me for paying so much attention to the quality of light and how it affected each set, but it really made an impact this time!) I haven't seen that much smiling from musician to musician onstage in quite some time; there was downright giggling with enthusiasm and playfulness. They did three or four conductions, and a couple highlights for me were Magda Mayas' percussive strikes at the piano in the first piece, the bluesy warblings and bell swings by trumpeter Liz Albee in the last one, Vandeweyer's soft but dense marimba mallet work during a duo with Buck, Hans Falb's concentrated stare while waiting for the sign from Deane before unleashing a wild chorus of twisted barks from his turntables, and all the razor-sharp back-and-forths between the groups of musicians happenstantially formed by being on either the left or right side of the stage.
I have to warn you I'm a very thorough lover. I had never heard of the French pianist François Tusques before looking at the program for this festival, and I say that with a little embarrassment because he has, I now know, an extensive discography that stretches back to 1965. His duo with now-local Nickelsdorfer Mats Gustafsson was clearly a dream of Gustafsson's, and I for one and am all in favor of the realizing of dreams, especially if they involve paying homage to an artistic hero/influence. Even better that Gustafsson chose to pay homage by playing together with Tusques. Gustafsson let Tusques begin their first improv, and Tusques played continuous off-kilter patterns to which he added jumpy, halting phrases. Tusques didn't play the reaction game at all, and continued to let Gustafsson pepper the proceedings with staccato outbursts and fragmentary lines. Gustafsson started their second improv and it immediately had a more Gustafsson-y feel with sharper turns, wider dynamic changes from ragingly loud to post-coitally soft, and moments of absolute togetherness. As their playing continued it became clear that Tusques has such a distinctive sense of jazz phrasing that his personal language takes some time to get involved in; it's a strange, often inscrutable, unrhythmically compelling tone, like folksy drifting. Sifting through memories for moments of courage; how many do you find? Deep down, Gustafsson is one giant, raspy, guttural howl from the abyss of the self, and when he tries to play it rhythmically it gets stuck in the throat, naturally. On purpose. How could it not? Gustafsson brought out his contrabass saxophone for one number and they both ended up stomping their feet on the stage; it's a contrabass saxophone and piano duet! How could they not?
All of the other times I've attended this festival it's been with at least a couple of other friends in tow, and the biggest difference I noticed with that absence was that the lack of an immediate circle of folks to talk to right after a set causes you to hear less: you're left with your own impressions only. Because when a friend hears something and tells you about it right after a set, you hear it too, and it adds to your memory and is inserted into the experience itself. After this particular set, I was talking with Baldrin, one of the numerous festival volunteers, and he described this set as "the minimal meets the animal." I hear that too, and it makes me thankful. A toast to all the other ears.
On paper, the quartet of John Tilbury on piano, Hamid Drake on drums, Franz Hautzinger on trumpet and Rozemarie Heggen on doublebass looked like a tangle of styles with no hope of cohesion: Tilbury's minimal piano, Drake's groovy bebop drums, Hautzinger's breath-focused trumpet, Heggen's punk bass. But this set was surprisingly sensical, with each musician listening so intently to the others and contributing just what they could offer that everything stuck together in deep accord. The set started with Tilbury opening and closing the piano lid–not bringing it all the way down or all the way up to reverberate any of the strings inside the piano, just enough to make the hinges creak and whoosh. As he told me later, "I like to remind people of the thing.”
This work with the piano lid immediately brought me back to the first time I saw him play, in AMM, in 1994. It was in an atrium, and I was up above Tilbury, looking down and admiring all the preparations inside the piano. At one point during the set he stopped playing and was casually looking around, not making any sound for several minutes. Suddenly he took the piano lid, slammed it down, and after a small pause, slammed it back up, and then continued to look around, not playing anything else for several more minutes. It was so intensely sonic and so intensely performative of the "thing-ness" of the instrument that my eighteen-year-old mind was instantly captivated by music that could not only contain such a gesture, but also incorporate it into a meaningful sonic landscape, as Rowe and Prévost did by refusing to directly react with it and instead continued to build layers of smoldering hum and rain-patter out of their guitar and drums.
Back to 2013. Mouse of grief for the past, rabbit of happiness for where it's brought you. Drake responded first to the piano-objecthood intro with light, swirling brushwork and Hautzinger added surprisingly melodic little patterns across the top. As unlikely as it sounds, Tilbury continued to 'lead' this set by going into places he wouldn't have on his own or with his usual cohorts, all the while remaining true to his own playing. He didn't get jazzy, but he did speed up and play hard, cranky chords, animating the proceedings with unexpected turns, bright-fisted corners and then subtle, tiny accents when the others had their own thing going and were rapt up in it. Drake's signature touch–O those bass drum thumps!–lent everything (and I do mean the whole world) a vibrancy. Heggen, like so many great doublebassists, displayed a supersensitivity to every moment, lending a solid dignity to every move: a bird's nest dignity, a fought-for dignity. The reward was a perfectly balanced set that somehow displayed every musician's strength while also revealing new facets of their playing.
At the Los Angeles County Fair I heard a dad bend down and ask his 4-year-old daughter, "Why aren't you afraid of the animals, but you are afraid of the rides?" He confused his own manufactured wariness of animals with his daughter's instinctual fear of artificially contorting the body. By the time Braaz, the final band of the night, came on, I was so absorbed with music that I was ready to party with the great kids running the festival's "back bar.” Near the end of their set, this quartet of tenor sax (Werner Zangerle), guitar (Gigi Gratt), doublebass (Marcus Huemer) and drums (Martin Flotzinger) played a tune with large-sweeping dynamics alternating between fast little quiet sounds and big loud swinging blasts. As we were talking in the back bar, our conversations instantly conformed to this structure as we went from whisper to normal voice to whisper with no hesitation, in direct correspondence with the music. Sometimes you hear more while partying along with music than by sitting in superbly silent concentration.
- Andrew Choate
Part 3 of 4, final installment next week