Petroglyph Music – 25th August 2024
Christopher Nisnibor
Deborah Fialkiewicz, who I first encountered performing as one half of her noisy dark ambient duo SPORE, is one busy and highly prolific creator, who not only manages to whip musical work spanning contemporary classical to ambience from out of the air at a remarkable pace, but clearly thrives on collaboration. This latest one, with German sound sculptor Wilfried Hanrath, is a further example of the way in which the coming together of artists with slightly different background and musical bents can make for unexpected – and brilliant – results.
As the accompanying notes explain, ‘the album starts with Deborah’s wonderful piece ‘Love’ and ends with Wilfried’s interpretation of it – ‘Love in other words’… The eight tracks in-between are based on noisy, dark ambient drones Deborah provided. Wilfried, inspired by a short trip to the sea, added to these by playing his synthesizer in the beautiful seaside resort. The result is a melange that combines the influences that both bring into this project to something larger than its components.’
Having recently returned from a week by the sea – on the Cornish coast – I can certainly vouch for the replenishing, refreshing, and inspirational qualities of the sea. Living inland and in climes which are perpetually humid and polluted, one immediately notices the difference in air quality when in the presence of a sea breeze.
As collaborations go, this is a particularly interesting one, not only musically as of and in itself, but it’s difficult to separate out what each of the contributors has brought here.
Fialkiewicz’ opening composition is gentle, combining tweaks, tweets, and twitters over the picked strings of a chamber orchestra of sorts, and a billowing wind which fills the background. It’s simultaneously sedate and mournful, and ends feeling unresolved.
Fialkiewicz’ capacity for conjuring dark drones is well-documented, primarily with her work as one half of Spore, but just how much manipulation they’ve been subjected to at the hand of Hanrath – which should really be an album title for a future collaborative / remix work of his – is impossible to determine. This is how collaborations should be, really: the aim should be to achieve a blend, to, and to conjure something which is neither one party nor the other. LOVE fits this criteria: it’s not about who does what, specifically, but the overall listening experience being something different, which is neither one artist or the other, but what they create in combination.
Following ‘Love’, ‘Oneness’ marks a complete shift in every way: it’s a bubbling quickfire electro piece that pretty much brings Kraftwerk together with Gershon Kingsley’s ‘Popcorn’. This numerical sequence of pieces, which runs from ‘Oneness’ to ‘Eigthness’ is an evolutionary, exploratory series, the majority of which are an expansive seven or eight minutes in duration and really mine a deep seam of bubbling, squelchy electronica which becomes increasingly engrossed in the quite granular details of the interplay and interaction between tone and texture, but without venturing fully into the dots-in-front-of-the-eyes details of the truly microtonal.
Slow winds and wide washes define the soundscapes offered here, and I suspect these are the foundations Fialkiewicz provided before Hanrath began to add his spin to them, with stabbing strikes and all kinds of digressions and generally unpredictable incidents which change both the course and the mood of the pieces.
‘Threeness’ is a particularly layered piece, ominous and brooding at first and subsequently, but interrupted by wibbling bleeps, a hint of an R2D2 seeking escape from the haunting confines of the track’s opening. Nothing is quite as it seems, and nothing feels quite right here.
‘Fourness’ is a torturous mess of oscillating drones and groans pitched against a mangled sampled vocal loop, and as one of the album’s darkest and most uncomfortable pieces, it’s very much in the vein of Throbbing Gristle. But suddenly, emerging from the frothing tempest of noise emerges a piano which brings tranquillity to provide balance. And this is where LOVE exceeds. There is a lot going on, and it’s an album which really revels in its contrasts and its manifold depths. This means that overall, and in context, LOVE is a standout work which conforms to no set parameters, doesn’t really sit anywhere, not least of all within the realms of expectation.
AA
Aural Aggravation 