DIRAC -
emphasis
(CD,
spekk)
“Chamber music of the 21st century”, I
like that. For being right and wrong at the same time. The melancholic
beauty of a Brahms quartet with Piano and Viola or a Chopin Sonata (the
largo of op. 65!!!) cannot be beaten by anything on this world, but the
overal sanctity and beauty of chamber music finds a mirror in the
longwinding atmosphere of electro-accoustic drones in a very postmodern way.
In that anything is connected to anything else way. Chamber music never uses
percussive elements, as far as I know, though, but from the closeness of a
small group of people working together to elaborate on a piece of music and
give its atmosphere to the world, there is a connection in the process.
Finally, as soon as someone starts to improvise he has clearly left the
field of classical music, especially in comparison to the structural codes
of chamber music. But if the improvisation draws not on technical
versatility and superficial showing-off, rather adds to a piece which in
re-listening sounds as if it had been scripted and rehearsed, then what
actually is the difference? Even a noted piece of music can never repeated
in the same manner, according to dogmatic music theory.
Dirac is a three piece of electro-acoustic improvisors
working in Vienna, Austria, with academic backgrounds in music and an open
mind for all kinds of sounds and fields of art. I didn’t even know it is
possible to study electroacoustics at our university for music and supplied
arts here, but what do you want from me, I am an old punkrocker, you know.
The four tracks on emphasis all have a subtle
percussive element, the clicking of some mechanic works, a muted bassdrum,
and so on, around which a host of various kinds of sounds are strewn. These
range from noisy drones to lonely notes on an old piano to field recordings.
Everything is very organic, moves as if blown along by the autumn wind. The
field recordings of crows in the street help to enhance the impression of
autumn, goodbyes, death and bittersweet melancholy. The track perusing the
crows is called Augarten, which is a very nice park in the second district
of Vienna and it doesn’t take a lot of intuition to guess at least some of
the source material comes from there.
Within the four tracks time seems to stand still.
Something breaks, notes echo through the vaccum, somewhere in the distance
something seems to be burning, childrens voices wave through the mist,
resonance and echo play an important role. It is like watching those small
white jellyfish in the black tank in the zoo of Vienna. An almost
hypnotizing experience that you may watch for half an hour and believe the
time that has passed is not more than a few minutes. Everything blurrs in
the force field of the music. A muted saxophone brushes over the boundaries
to free jazz, dropping piano notes draw from centuries of nocturnes, rising
density (“bantu”) in sound as from nowhere makes me think of a decade of
listening to Japan Noise as well as the primordial experience of watching a
storm accumulate in the mountains, feeling the electricity in the air.
A wonderful way to spend away an hour of your time.
Somehow I believe that what “emphasis” wants to tell us is that there is
nothing more important than time, expanded time, better used time. Carpe
diem and all that. An important lesson that cannot be repeated too often.
Another album is planned in early 2010 on the honorable Valeot records.
