Zeitkratzer Records 99z2 Sonx

Zeitkratzer

Burkhard Schlothauer, violin; Michael Moser, cello; Alexander Frangenheim, double bass; Axel Dörner, trumpet; Melvyn Poore, tuba; Ulrich Krieger; saxophones; Reinhold Friedl, piano; Luca Venitucci, accordion; Raymond Kaczynski, percussion; Dietmar Dinklage, sound diffusion.

  1. Parentesi [Luca Venitucci] (01.46)
  2. A chest of drawers [Raymond Kaczynski] (05.06)
  3. Broken choir [Nicholas Collins] (13.01)
  4. Äonen [Nico Richter-De Vroe] (09.45)
  5. Coriolis effect [Elliott Sharp] (16.52)
  6. Traces 51 (Pollock) [Keith Rowe] (05.25)
  7. The cubes [Laurie Schwartz] (09.38)
  8. Jammermusik [Daniel Ott] (01.32)
Recorded in January 1999 at Podewil Berlin.

Design (front cover reproduced above) by Moritz Wermelskirch.

Press release/description

sonX: fresh song, expression, but also clear form, play. While Luca Venitucci challenges the sonic fantasy of the ensemble with his action score, Parentesi ("Parentheses") - in a further development of John Zorn's game pieces, musicians decide according to a complex set of rules when to give each other space, when to interrupt, etc. - Nicolas Collins decomposes historical music for use as ostinato in his piece Broken Choir. The musicians take up chords of the looped Renaissance music, contrapose them. Pop rhythms and harmonies are set against concentrated solo outbursts. In A Chest of Drawers, percussionist Ray Kaczynski performs on - among other things - a bicycle wheel, with which he structures rhythms or ironically shatters sound textures. Nico Richter-De Vroe produced an acribically notated action and sound score for €onen ("Aeons") and zeitkratzer developed a dramatic concept for the tempi and sequences of sound and noise: filigree sounds arise as from out of nowhere, disappear into nothingness again: aeons. Elliott Sharp took on the challenge to devise an ensemble composition that doesn't conceal its origins and also challenges zeitkratzer. The title of the piece, Coriolis Effect, is taken from chaos theory - the coriolis effect describes the influence on weather when heterogeneous cloud layers move diversely against one another. The composition, rhythmically complex and consisting of several parts, follows this same principle. Elliott Sharp conducts the dynamic developments and the so-called "pop-outs" - short, wild solo inserts. Keith Rowe's score for Traces 51 (Pollock) consists entirely of fragments from the series "Traces 51" by Jackson Pollock. Rowe worked especially hard with zeitkratzer in applying the gesture of action painting to instrumental gesture and on making the acoustic effects musically fruitful. Laurie Schwartz permits some musicians only one, allows others a choice between two musical gestures or sound events to be performed within narrowly defined parameters specific to each instrument. The fast cutting and radical assemblage of the cubes - the score principally indicates entrances and exits of musicians - is all the more intensified by the composer's penchant for the linguistic integration of the profane which, in this case, consists of voice recordings of actors James Urbaniak and Mary McBride performing excerpts from Richard Foreman's 1997 play "The Universe" (used by kind permission). The last piece on the disc, Jammermusik ("Lamenting Music") by Daniel Ott is in essence a kind of street music. With its asymmetrical meters, however, it can also be understood as a playful parody of circus music.
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