Organized Music From Thessaloniki
This is the second CD released by the quartet of Burkhard Beins (selected percussion, objects), Lucio Capece (soprano sax, bass clarinet, preparations), Rhodri Davies (electric harp, electro-acoustic devices) and Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board). It features a live recording from 2007 at the NPAI Festival in Parthenay, France, yet it sounds – for any purpose and effect – like a studio session.
The duration of less than 45 minutes is ideal for the music to expand without unnecessary elongations and repetitions. An event is given the right time to manifest, get understood, acknowledged and – possibly - assimilated. The developing of the various phases is based upon primary colours belonging to two main categories: extensive tones – generally ruthless and quite sinister, now and then subtly stimulating – and transliterations of cryptic messages from some space between expected sound and sheer physicality of a particular vibration. The latter type of manifestation is what mostly outlines our concentration in the performance, the aims that the musicians had set achieved through motorized mechanisms, abrasive procedures or mere sensitiveness when corporeal issues – air, liquids – are a part of the test.
This is not a jovial work waking up a sense of merriment, nor it’s supernatural enough to cause the classic feeling of not belonging to reality in a certain moment. The aural symptoms are all very present, in your face, substantial even in their quietest aspects. The rare occasions in which cogitation is allowed are instantly wiped out by powerful surges, the compositeness of the sonic tissue ominously remunerative. Accordingly, the fragment from the 17th to the 21st minute - a potently collective, almost tribal massive growth - is enormously significant. One is afraid that the memory of Beins’ monstrous clatter and Capece’s piercing squeals will keep the addressee awake and overwrought for many nights to come.
Distress and deduction, explicitness and inquisition, hostility and gratification. The stability of these contrasting elements is utmost, the timbres generated an expression of enthralling cold-heartedness that nonetheless reveals a perceptive intellectual capacity. It’s something that transpires continuously from these unwelcoming blends, and becomes clearer - in different points - with each new listen.
