Silt

A singular but specific take on electro-acoustic improvising, this three-quarters of an hour plus improvisation involves a cultivated take on three motifs by four authoritative artists. Aussie-in-Berlin drummer Tony Buck adds calculated shakes and pings to the program as German turntablist Ignaz Schick’s crackles, rumbles and samples suffuse the tunes’ unexplored corners. Meanwhile two Austrians, microtonal trumpet explorer Franz Hautzinger and Philip Zoubek, who plays prepared piano and synthesizer, create emblematic sound currents. Each improviser has worked with many timbre innovators from Charlemagne Palestine to Isabelle Dutoit and Carl Ludwig Hübsch.

Making the most of textures that can’t be clearly ascribed to programming or extended techniques, the kaleidoscopic tracks include whistle, burbles, reverberations, slaps and whooshes. Occasionally personal identification is transparent, as when Hautzinger produces portamento yawns, rippling triplets and vocalized grace notes; Buck’s accompaniment encompassed distant bell shakes or passing locomotive-like rattles; and Zoubek’s music-box-like tinkling on the keys or juddering shakes from items juddering on the strings are emphasized. Yet voltage shimmies or tremolo wavering heard could have easily come from the sampler as the synthesizer.

As the quartet moves through the program with distinctive textures in double, triple or quadruple counterpoint, stability and tone substitution arise. Air-raid-siren-like emulations from the turntablist’s stock meet a tough drum backbeat or an airy brass treble smear is intensified when mixed with pressurized sweeps percussion and synthesizer.

By the concluding “The Comets” logical evolution is confirmed. Near-romantic piano chording is subsumed by internal piano string shakes as low-pitched trumpet fragment into grace notes. Finally Krishna cult-like finger cymbal claps meet up with sampled and processed basso voices and distorted stopped piano keys as the narrative climax. This relaxed mulch of half-valve snorts, piano string vibrations and percussion clinks rounds the circle to bring the improvisation back to the dexterous introduction.

Silt is defined as channel-choking sediment. But there are no blockages in the free-flowing improvisations presented here.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Lunatics 2, Gravity’s End 3. The Comets

Personnel: Franz Hautzinger (trumpet); Philip Zoubek (prepared piano, synthesizer); Tony Buck (drums) and Ignaz Schick (turntables and sampler)