Stahlstuhl and Andrea Pandolfo – Improvisation 5

Elli

Because who doesn’t want to have a record that’s recorded largely with scraping chairs on a floor? No-one, that’s who.

I feel like there was a time in my life when there was a lot of object-scraping going on in music I watched and listened to, but it’s been a while. And it’s nice to have something that’s largely about textures and big ole’ rhythmic cycles (ie, the amount of scrape you can get from a couple of legs moved a few feet).

So perhaps it’s mildly disingenuous to emphasise only the chairs bit (Olavo Vianna) — there’s an improvising trumpet (Andrea Poldolfo) and some sort of live electronics processing (Emanuele Battisti). So what you get is a bunch of whale-moan alike chair scraping, a fluttering and textural trumpet and as-live sonic processing.

As with most textual improv pieces worth their salt, there’s a real collapse of which voice is responsible for which sound; trumpet may be looped or live or be a chair or electronics confound the extent to which you can perceive separate voices. Sampling allows for dubbing in or out and there’s a degree of space and tension throughout.

These records are always particularly odd, insofar as there’s a lot of them and it’s difficult to say why this particular one is good. Certainly part two hits a meditative, almost melodic stride with all players seemingly coalescing around a kind of malevolent low hum punctuated with sporadic trumpet motifs. Possibly the key is that, despite the instrumental make up, this isn’t a self-obsessedly abstracted record (so common to scrapy textural free improv), but rather a sparingly deceptive record — moments of scraping desolation, moments of submerged, drowningg dub, and never so many voices that it disappears into its own miasma.

Extra bonus points in that it’s succinct — just shy of twenty minutes, resisting the improvisers urge to go on until the audience gets fidgety. Precarious of me to say ,but there’s the impression that the players are aware of musicality and positively flirt with it on occasion. One of those records that could’ve been a curio but ends up being better than it should be. FFO scrapy improv and submerged textural electronics. Big up Stahlstuhl.

-Kev Nickells-