Sonoscopia sonos – 15th September 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
Trobollowitsch is certainly a name that sticks in the mind, and so it was that back in 2016, I penned a piece on Roha by the Austrian Sound artist. At the time, I struggled to really connect with his conceptual compositions.
This latest offering finds him working with Thomas Rohrer, a Swiss musician, who ‘plays the rabeca, (a Brazilian fiddle), and soprano saxophone’, and whose work ‘is largely based on free improvisation, but also engages in a dialogue with traditional Brazilian music.’
The collaboration between the pair actually began in 2017, but they didn’t begin work on any recording until January 2021, when, according to the bio, ‘they embarked on a duo project combining Trobollowitsch’s rotating mechanical turntables equipped with branches, wood and dried leaves with Rohrer’s soprano saxophone, small objects and rabeca… During their collaborative recording process, renowned singer Sainkho Namtchylak from the Tuva region contributed her captivating, versatile voice, which she has used to great effect in a variety of musical genres, including jazz and electronic music.’
Given their diverse background and different modes off operation, this collaboration was always going to be not only eclectic, but a collision of diversity, and the question would always be to what extent do they compliment one another, or otherwise pull in such different directions as to render the work more of a competition than a collaboration? Given that both Trobollowitsch and Rohrer are credited with ‘recomposition’ of several tracks, there’s a sense that this effort is defined, if not by friction as such, then by differences, and a working method which entails dissecting and reconstructing, a restlessness and dissatisfaction.
Crackling static and an electrical hum are the key elements of the title track. It’s somehow both spacious and claustrophobic, and as the sounds rumble and echo around, you feel like your shut right in a small room – more like a walk-in cupboard – as the serrated buzzes and grinding drilling sounds fizz and fret all around, gradually warping and twisting, sometimes ballooning and others shrivelling. Suddenly, I jump. Is that my phone vibrating? No, it’s not, it’s a vibration puncturing the third wall, something that sounds like it’s in the room rather than coming from the speakers, which are by now emanating shrill blasts of feedback.
The sound collaging on this album is something else, leaping into the three-dimensional at the most unexpected moments, and the sounds and textures constantly shifting to forge a work which is more than music, more than sound: this is something you feel, not emotionally or cerebrally, but physically: it makes your fingers tingle and move in a quest to grapple with the details. Sometimes those details are dark and demonic, as on the unsettling ‘Ovaa’. The vocals are rasping, gasping subterranean, subhuman grunts and gasps, strangled cackles that cark and bleat and croak and claw up from the sewers. It’s pure horror.
There are undulating, stuttering low-end bumps, there are hornets the size of buzzards as your car breaks down and your skull slowly crumbles as your brain struggles to process everything… anything. This is a soundtrack to something that simply shouldn’t exist; it’s aa soundtrack to your worst nightmares, as yet unimagined.
The production, the panning, the listening experience of interacting with this in the way it’s intended is terrifying and surprising in equal measure, as tweets and twitters occupy the same space as thunderous thumps and insectoid skitters and metallic scrapes and… there’s a lot going on, and it all makes for in accumulate and intense and really rather difficult sort set – not really of compositions, but largely incoherent audio processes. The accumulations and stacking of the sounds is by no means truly random or haphazard, but their assemblage creates as experience which feels altogether more happenstance. It’s a scrappy, scratchy, stop-start mangling of noise, and at times, it’s scary and strange, at other’s it’s ominous and eerie. It’s unsettling, and difficult to absorb. It’s incredible.