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radu malfatti

__ wechseljahre einer hyäne _30:38

intersax :
_ ulrich krieger : sopran
_ martin losert : alt
_ tobias rüger : bariton
_ reimar volker : bariton

(recorded 19 septembre 2003 at podewil / berlin)

TEMPORARY FAULT

RADU MALFATTI – Wechseljahre Einer Hyäne (To Ulrich Krieger)

Performed by Intersax (Ulrich Krieger, Martin Losert, Tobias Rüger and Reimar Volker), this composition for 2 x baritone, alto and soprano saxophones by Malfatti is among the most fascinating I've heard from his repertoire (which, admittedly, is not exactly my specialization). This recording is dated 2003 and was captured live at Berlin 's Podewil. Amidst the expected silences (in this case we can really say that, thanks to an excellently behaved audience who literally seems to hold their breath during the execution) gently blown clusters of the peaceful kind materialize at different times - sometimes closer than one would expect - over the course of 30 minutes, fading neon signs involuntarily trying to indicate the right way to a lost soul in a street at late night. When those murmured chords vanish, a single saxophone maintains a note a little longer, remaining alone for a few instants to nail the meaning of that figure to the ground. I don't know if it depends on your reporter's not exactly sundrenched mood in a gloomy, coldly plumbeous Sunday afternoon, but the piece results an ideal sonic complement to the aura of pessimistic resignation which has been lingering in the house for a while today, and that someone – not me, though – might associate with a pre-death sensation, like if everything that's made appeared as a waste of time, the living organism just going through the motions to arrive at tomorrow. The intrigue of life also lies in the correct mental management of similar moments, and the music is very effective in that sense – especially when enriched by the circumstantial noises coming from afar.

MASSIMO RICCI

Sunday, 17 January 2010

http://temporaryfault.blogspot.com/2010/01/thirty-minutes-or-less.html >>>

http://temporaryfault.blogspot.com/ >>>

Kenneth Kirschner: "Filaments & Voids"; Radu Malfatti: "Wechseljahre einer Hyäne"

About silence & fetishisations: Moves against unhealthy obsessions.

It is by no means a coincidence that the relative importance of silence as a musical element has greatly increased over the past fifty years. Libraries' worth of books have been written about the inferiority complex of contemporary composers caused by the seemingly superior toolbox of the visual artist – most recently in David Stubb's „Fear of Music - Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen“. Through the absence of sound, rather than anaemic permutations of de-harmonised series, musicians were finally able to attain the same degree of elegant minimalism that painters could express in all but blank canvases and endless planes of white. Effectively, the use of silence connected the work with its environment, just like a Rothko would interact with the room it was hung in. While it may not exactly have been particularly helpful in bringing their art to wider audiences, the extension of the palette brought about by this paradigm shift has reverberated on an international scale and prompted the rise of scores of micro-genres and -labels all dealing with this polarity in one way or another: When a trio of composers from the influential Wandelweiser-collective visited Japan in Winter of 2007, they were handed several CDs by local colleagues. Antoine Beuger especially received an entire pile of them, with some denoted as „more Wandelweiser“ and others as „less Wandelweiser“. As Beugner noted, on one of the “more Wandelweiser” discs, „there appeared to be no sound at all“.

It can not be denied that a kind of fetishisation has started to manifest itself. Just like violent fusillades of noise and abrasive walls of distortion can turn into aesthetic propositions, there is something distinctly beautiful about a work comprising of nothing but short episodes of sound (or islands, to use another popular metaphor) within a continuum of quietude. If these episodes, in turn, increasingly consist of decontextualised and purified field recordings or microscopic clicks, crackles, purrs and blips, then this represents just as much a questioning of conventional ideals about composing as the proposition of a new order. Even the act of listening itself takes on a different logic, turning from following a motive develop in relation to its harmonic environment into observing a series of discreet, yet purposefully juxtaposed acoustic events.

[ … ]

And besides, in comparison to the oeuvre of Radu Malfatti, Kirschner's output seems almost disturbingly loud and action-packed. Malfatti's body of work is of a glorious uniqueness. When German Composer Jörg Wiedmann, for example, was unsure how to begin writing his first String Quartet, overwhelmed with the format's tradition, he turned the process of beginning into his point of departure: The first few minutes of his piece are imbued with the musicians desperately trying to produce an audible sound. In the music of Malfatti, however, there is not even a beginning or an end any more. On „Wechseljahre einer Hyäne“, gloomy and grimly glowing Saxophone-chords inhabit a 30-minute-long space. Each one is announced by the collective breath of the ensemble Intersax and differs from the others in the relative lengths of its attack, sustain and decay. Some are quickly aborted, while others linger in the air for an extensive period, fizzling out into singular, increasingly quiet lines. Each one also contains a different emotional connotation, ranging from sensual to cool, from disturbing to consoling and from inviting to repelling. But essentially, each one is an independent unit and with just a few exceptions, they do not mix with each other, forming no harmonic chains or tension archs.

One would expect the next move to become extremely important in such a sparsely populated environment. In a way, however, the exact opposite is true: As each breath of sound manifests itself as a self-sustained event, there is no longer a need for a next move at all. „Wechseljahre einer Hyäne“doesn't progress from a point of departure towards a destination, but it oscillates laterally, safely resting within its personal pocket of time. Silence isn't a demonstrative philosophical principle. Perhaps it would even be correct to say that, from a compositional point of view, silence doesn't “occur” at all here. Rather, one merely perceives its presence because we need a word to describe the absence of sound.

Intriguingly, too, the more one immerses oneself into this only outwardly „serious“, „difficult“ and “provoking“, album, the more it reveals itself as a deeply calming experience. By employing gaps and voids in their works, Kirschner and Malfatti may not always be intending to make grand revolutionary statements. They may just as well simply be liberating themselves from the unhealthy obsession of producing sound all the time.

By Tobias Fischer

http://www.tokafi.com/newsitems/kenneth-kirschner-filaments-voids-radu-malfatti-wechseljahre-einer-hyane/>>>

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radu malfatti __ wechseljahre einer hyäne _30:38 intersax : _ ulrich krieger : sopran _ martin losert : alt _ tobias rüger : bariton _ reimar volker : bariton (recorded 19 septembre 2003 at podewil / berlin)		flac 16bit 44100hz install flac
download cover download the whole mp3 release (41,8 mb) _ etlefeucomme_netlabel_
Cette création est mise à disposition sous un contrat Creative Commons. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
email: radu.malfattiatchello.at
… I'm interested in a world of thoughts, actions, music and so forth, which reflects the cultural situation and is reflective. What's needed today is not faster, higher, stronger, louder - I want to know all about "the lull in the storm". ... Moving on to your recent rediscovery of composition, could you give me your definitions of form, material and structure, which you referred to earlier? I think the distinction between form and structure is especially relevant. I know that this is a tricky question and I'll try to start with an easy analogy (one I used once in a classroom trying to explain it to kids - which always is good for one's own understanding). Take a house: the form is the overall shape of the building - e.g. round, square, long, high and narrow etc. The material is clear - wood, bricks, concrete (nice word in this context) etc. The structure would be the shapes, patterns, design, layout of the different rooms and spaces and the their number, e.g. one big room, many small ones etc. It's only an analogy and analogies never really work, but it's a start… Extract: Interview by Dan Warburton, February 2001 http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/malfatti.html >>>>
"can you see music in the dark?" francis brown. music also available on cd-r : b-boim records >>>
============ VITAL WEEKLY ============ number 688 --------------------- week 30 --------------------- RADU MALFATTI - WECHSELJAHRE EINER HYANE Intersax is a saxophone quartet, lead by Ulrich Krieger (soprano) together with Martin Loser (alt), Tobias Rüger (bariton) and Reimar Volker (bariton). On September 19th 2003 they played a composed piece by Radu Malfatti, called 'Wechseljahre Einer Hyane', with 'To Ulrich Krieger' as its subtitle. In just under thirty minutes they play clustered tones together which are cut with passages of silence of about the same length. Only in the middle part (say from minute ten to minute twenty), the silence is much shorter and almost things run into eachother. After that the silence takes a much bigger part and the piece becomes very silent indeed. A great piece, but one that requires a quiet environment (which today here is a rarity) or to be listened with headphones. (FdW) http://www.vitalweekly.net/688.html >> _
WONDERFUL WOODEN REASONS Radu Malfatti - Wechseljahre Einer Hyäne (etlefeucomme_netlabel/004) Now this is rather wonderful. Composed by Malfatti and realised by Intersax this is 4 saxophonists (1 soprano, 1 alto & 2 baritones) playing gentle, single note phrases - possibly the length of a breath - amidst extended periods of silence. It's immaculate minimalism mirrors the beauty of a Morton Feldman composition and is utterly bewitching in every way. http://wonderfulwoodenreasons.homestead.com/reviewsMtoO.html >>>
TEMPORARY FAULT RADU MALFATTI – Wechseljahre Einer Hyäne (To Ulrich Krieger) Performed by Intersax (Ulrich Krieger, Martin Losert, Tobias Rüger and Reimar Volker), this composition for 2 x baritone, alto and soprano saxophones by Malfatti is among the most fascinating I've heard from his repertoire (which, admittedly, is not exactly my specialization). This recording is dated 2003 and was captured live at Berlin 's Podewil. Amidst the expected silences (in this case we can really say that, thanks to an excellently behaved audience who literally seems to hold their breath during the execution) gently blown clusters of the peaceful kind materialize at different times - sometimes closer than one would expect - over the course of 30 minutes, fading neon signs involuntarily trying to indicate the right way to a lost soul in a street at late night. When those murmured chords vanish, a single saxophone maintains a note a little longer, remaining alone for a few instants to nail the meaning of that figure to the ground. I don't know if it depends on your reporter's not exactly sundrenched mood in a gloomy, coldly plumbeous Sunday afternoon, but the piece results an ideal sonic complement to the aura of pessimistic resignation which has been lingering in the house for a while today, and that someone – not me, though – might associate with a pre-death sensation, like if everything that's made appeared as a waste of time, the living organism just going through the motions to arrive at tomorrow. The intrigue of life also lies in the correct mental management of similar moments, and the music is very effective in that sense – especially when enriched by the circumstantial noises coming from afar. MASSIMO RICCI Sunday, 17 January 2010 http://temporaryfault.blogspot.com/2010/01/thirty-minutes-or-less.html >>> http://temporaryfault.blogspot.com/ >>>
tokafi Kenneth Kirschner: "Filaments & Voids"; Radu Malfatti: "Wechseljahre einer Hyäne" About silence & fetishisations: Moves against unhealthy obsessions. It is by no means a coincidence that the relative importance of silence as a musical element has greatly increased over the past fifty years. Libraries' worth of books have been written about the inferiority complex of contemporary composers caused by the seemingly superior toolbox of the visual artist – most recently in David Stubb's „Fear of Music - Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen“. Through the absence of sound, rather than anaemic permutations of de-harmonised series, musicians were finally able to attain the same degree of elegant minimalism that painters could express in all but blank canvases and endless planes of white. Effectively, the use of silence connected the work with its environment, just like a Rothko would interact with the room it was hung in. While it may not exactly have been particularly helpful in bringing their art to wider audiences, the extension of the palette brought about by this paradigm shift has reverberated on an international scale and prompted the rise of scores of micro-genres and -labels all dealing with this polarity in one way or another: When a trio of composers from the influential Wandelweiser-collective visited Japan in Winter of 2007, they were handed several CDs by local colleagues. Antoine Beuger especially received an entire pile of them, with some denoted as „more Wandelweiser“ and others as „less Wandelweiser“. As Beugner noted, on one of the “more Wandelweiser” discs, „there appeared to be no sound at all“. It can not be denied that a kind of fetishisation has started to manifest itself. Just like violent fusillades of noise and abrasive walls of distortion can turn into aesthetic propositions, there is something distinctly beautiful about a work comprising of nothing but short episodes of sound (or islands, to use another popular metaphor) within a continuum of quietude. If these episodes, in turn, increasingly consist of decontextualised and purified field recordings or microscopic clicks, crackles, purrs and blips, then this represents just as much a questioning of conventional ideals about composing as the proposition of a new order. Even the act of listening itself takes on a different logic, turning from following a motive develop in relation to its harmonic environment into observing a series of discreet, yet purposefully juxtaposed acoustic events. [ … ] And besides, in comparison to the oeuvre of Radu Malfatti, Kirschner's output seems almost disturbingly loud and action-packed. Malfatti's body of work is of a glorious uniqueness. When German Composer Jörg Wiedmann, for example, was unsure how to begin writing his first String Quartet, overwhelmed with the format's tradition, he turned the process of beginning into his point of departure: The first few minutes of his piece are imbued with the musicians desperately trying to produce an audible sound. In the music of Malfatti, however, there is not even a beginning or an end any more. On „Wechseljahre einer Hyäne“, gloomy and grimly glowing Saxophone-chords inhabit a 30-minute-long space. Each one is announced by the collective breath of the ensemble Intersax and differs from the others in the relative lengths of its attack, sustain and decay. Some are quickly aborted, while others linger in the air for an extensive period, fizzling out into singular, increasingly quiet lines. Each one also contains a different emotional connotation, ranging from sensual to cool, from disturbing to consoling and from inviting to repelling. But essentially, each one is an independent unit and with just a few exceptions, they do not mix with each other, forming no harmonic chains or tension archs. One would expect the next move to become extremely important in such a sparsely populated environment. In a way, however, the exact opposite is true: As each breath of sound manifests itself as a self-sustained event, there is no longer a need for a next move at all. „Wechseljahre einer Hyäne“doesn't progress from a point of departure towards a destination, but it oscillates laterally, safely resting within its personal pocket of time. Silence isn't a demonstrative philosophical principle. Perhaps it would even be correct to say that, from a compositional point of view, silence doesn't “occur” at all here. Rather, one merely perceives its presence because we need a word to describe the absence of sound. Intriguingly, too, the more one immerses oneself into this only outwardly „serious“, „difficult“ and “provoking“, album, the more it reveals itself as a deeply calming experience. By employing gaps and voids in their works, Kirschner and Malfatti may not always be intending to make grand revolutionary statements. They may just as well simply be liberating themselves from the unhealthy obsession of producing sound all the time. By Tobias Fischer http://www.tokafi.com/newsitems/kenneth-kirschner-filaments-voids-radu-malfatti-wechseljahre-einer-hyane/>>>
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