COUTUME | Saints de glace : qui étaient-ils ? ➽ https://bit.ly/Saints-Glace Désignant une période climatologique embrassant les 11, 12 et 13 mai, jours où étaient traditionnellement célébrés respectivement saint Mamert, saint Pancrace et saint Servais, les saints de glace ont la réputation d'amener la froidure en plein milieu du joli mois de mai, d'où le surnom qui leur fut infligé mais que leur existence ne justifie en rien
Brannten Schnüre — Erinnerungen An Gesichter (Low Company)
Photo by Michael Heindrich
Brannten Schnüre, the German duo of Christian Schoppik and Katie Rich, create a dark and hypnotic folk music. Each release they’ve put forth delivers a wide bandwidth of instrumentation, churned into a unionizing sound anchored by an underlying breathy drone. It sounds as if they take cues from the hurdy-gurdy, not necessarily incorporating the instrument itself but feeding off its conceptual logistics or mechanics, and the myriad folk offshoots it touches or helped foster. Other modern folkers could be accused of taking odd inspiration here too, maybe the collaborations of Delphine Dora and Sophie Cooper, a large portion of the Okraina catalog, or French improvisors Pancrace.
Their third vinyl release, Erinnerungen An Gesichter (“Memories of Faces”), is another mesmerizing gush of breathy drone laced with fragile melodies. Most pieces contain a chorus of blown reeds or brass mouthpieces, bowed strings, and pressed keys, or recordings of either one of these things, altered and looped. Schoppik plays most of the instruments, pitching its vibrations through a pedal rig to loop it, shaping the contours of trailing tones for a haunting effect. It’s as if he tries to wriggle out the vague folk melodies that were plucked from the small rotating cylinders of the first music boxes, the 18th century ones made by Genevan watchmakers. Much like these sound makers, Brannten Schnüre’s music embalms as it creates, generating something which is spirited yet appears as a distant spectacle. Rich mainly sticks to vocals, selectively embellishing or counteracting a soft melodic component in Schoppik’s music, or taking the lead, lending to the duo’s more song-like pieces, building a small, concise framework which Schoppik follows and hugs like a vine to a trellis.
Their sparser and sharper, transparent vignettes sometimes resemble the free creations of Fontaine and Areski, especially when Schoppik sings with Rich, while their long-winded dips touch on the vaguely atonal, combinational tones of Nico’s Desertshore. The duo’s past vinyl releases, Sommer Im Pfirsichhain and Muschelsammlung, are intricate creations in their own right, but at times they falter in transition from piece to piece. Erinnerungen An Gesichter resonates on its own terms with brief and sudden transportive moments, offering just as many contrastive moments as either of their last LPs.