Day 2
Drinking cappuccino while watching the sun touch the tops of the mountains, i realise what i think are the heavily filtered sounds of doves making it through the triple glazing are actually UMS’s recorder, coming from the rehearsal directly below me. JIP’s voice joins in, gently cooing, and as their notes mingle and intertwine it becomes something akin to a courting ritual. i wonder what it’ll be in the concert this evening.
Cycle ride up the side of the slopes, into the valley where Minstigerbach flows. Now walking, and the torrent acts like a low-pass filter. Yet the low registers filling my ears seem balanced by the brightness of the day, sunlight as treble, rocks and trees as midrange.
Only when i turn around, walking back further from the water, does the filter subside. Higher registers start to speak, and the sound of Alpine choughs comes down to me, challenging the white noise water with bursts of electronic pulses. The invisible birds i heard yesterday are here too, as well as grasshoppers, together creating a complex, pitchless texture that feels simultaneously everywhere yet no more substantial than air.
Hard Facts
The most immediate hard fact, it seems, is how inadequately prepared i am for what ensues. Perhaps i should have realised that a working knowledge of (among others) Chinese, Turkish and Brazilian political activities, events and upheavals from the last few decades would be essential to this evening’s music. Perhaps not.
i gaze at Thiago Cury‘s Epitáfio do Indignado in total, mystified wonder. UMS ‘n JIP playing maniacally with spinning tops; watching a music video, edgy and posturing, faux-confrontational, before taking over the singing; reciting texts by Pablo Neruda; watching another video, upbeat and patriotic, evidently pertaining to Bolsanaro’s reign. Peach Blossom, a song by Guo Wenjing, speaks less as political statement than a short, rather tender homage to its author Hai Zi. Beyond its basic prettiness it’s hard to know what more might be made of it; maybe that was meant to be enough. Reuben de Lautour‘s ifadeh presents an opportunity for the duo to showcase tight, rhythmic synchronisation. JIP’s sounds – sub-words, almost sub-vocalised, practically just tiny configurations of air – so aligned with UMS’s recorder the two are inseparable (possibly what i heard at breakfast), as if the instrument is sounding what the voice isn’t. Often in their performances i’ve thought of UMS as the charmer and JIP the snake, and that sense emerges here too, a tension of cause, effect, dominance and reciprocity. Yet the piece ultimately feels inert, its fragmented gestures an overfamiliar, empty device. Any message, if it has one, seems lost.
Max E. Keller‘s Muss verboten werden speaks a little stronger, musically at least, introducing playfully malevolent scissors into the mix as a literal aspect of its focus on things being forbidden. The scissors cut both the air, in rhythmic patterns, and, later, photographs that end up strewn on the floor. Most impressive of all, though, is UMS’s highly acrobatic recorder part, which is in turn transformed in a mesmerising, beautiful sequence – expanded with electronics – of rising and falling glissandi. As with Wenjing’s song earlier, i hear no statement, more an almost abstract response to the concept of ‘verboten’.
Of the two works that make the strongest impression, one is in spite of its political subtext, the other the complete opposite. The one comes from Javier Hagen, whose im zeichen der schildkröte – drei auswege doesn’t transmit anything of the plea for pacifism supposedly at its core (having a translation of the Brecht text might have helped) but fascinates in its shifting mode of expression. First, having the focus of chant, delicate but earnest, broken and circular, a litany of fragments. Now dance-like, with high falling tones from the recorder, some blanched by multiphonics. Finally, almost an alien form of chant, a group protest of sorts that dissolves and ends up high and plosive, JIP’s repeated laughs all the more disturbing for how constricted they are. As for the other – the hardest fact of all – i could say more. i wish i could say more. More i cannot say.
