Reinhold Friedl & Costis Drygianakis – ta amfótera en / two into one
zeitkratzer productions – 28th February 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
Reinhold Friedl has been a significant contributor to the world of avant-garde music for a long time, not only as a leading explorer of the potentials of the prepared piano, as pioneered by John Cage, but in excavating the works of historical composers and reconfiguring those of more contemporary ones, leading the zeitkratzer ensemble through performances of Metal Machine Music and selected cuts from Whitehouse’s catalogue.
This particular collaboration coalesced during the pandemic, after which, as we learn, ‘Costis Drygianakis recorded Reinhold Friedl’s special piano sounds on a Blüthner grand piano with a bunch of extremely diverse microphones, ranging from a beautiful old Neumann U67 to a cheap tape cassette machine and even a Dictaphone. The resulting recordings have been classified, selected and processed at his home studio in Kritharia, Greece. No other sounds have been used.’
ta amfótera en is one continuous piece, just over an hour induration, and it’s a journey, to say the least. By ‘journey’, I mean torturous experience. It’s dark, punishing, pulverising, scraping, nightmarish. The first two minutes alone are a soundtrack to extreme horror – fear shaking amidst tremulous piano, heavy discord rumbling low and disconcerting to the point of spiking anxiety, after which there are protracted warped drones and rumblings which drag on, scraping and twisting, sonorous and uncomfortable. Amidst rolling, swirling, churning ambience and awkward, uncomfortable noise, random piano notes spike, seemingly at random. Gongs chime, crash, and clash.
When I was a child, the warping, discordant intro to ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran intrigued me. It created a palpable tension which affected me inexplicably at the age of nine. Perhaps this brief snippet of sound, dissonant, metallic, paved the way to my later obsession with musical otherness. The specific reason I reference this formative experience is that lengthy segments of two into one sound almost exactly like those opening bars of ‘Rio’ – scraping, discordant, a little like twisting metal.
two into one warps and hums, scrapes and drones, and occasionally plonks and thunks, the sounds rising from a random and seemingly unarranged twisting spill of sonic strangeness. There are chimes, and chsllenges.
There is much space – just as there are whistles and feedback – on two into one. The experience is, perhaps inevitably, disorientating, vaguely bewildering, even. There is something about this work which lifts you off the planet: to attempt to pin it to the particulars of contemporary rock music seems to be missing the point. Explore this release… and discover.
AA
Aural Aggravation 