Found Sounds #4

Every festival is an exercise in diversity as unity, not only musically—-a heterogeneous programme draws in diverse crowds. On my first evening at CTM Festival, I met someone I hadn’t seen in months or years circa every twenty minutes. While those moments were fleeting, all of them provided me with the opportunity to catch up in more sustainable ways. »I’ll drop you a line through …,« a friend I hadn’t seen in years said, before adding with a grin: »Well, what platform are we still allowed to use?«

A mere a week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the joke took a swing at the anticipatory obedience of swathes of tech billionaires who suddenly seemed more than willing to adapt their platforms to the cultural shift that the change of the political landscape both represented and fostered. Now more than ever, we are acutely aware that further feeding these platforms with our data through using them is detrimental to our social lives both individually and collectively—and that we need to find ways around them to truly be social again.

It’s interesting to think that this exchange took place in the context of a music festival, one of those spaces that serve as temporary meeting points between the international and the regional, different viewpoints and like-minded people. In fact, I can’t help but think that the world at large can learn a lot from the music scene: Its members know a thing or two about creating diversity as unity, including building their own infrastructures, because working with others towards a shared goal despite their differences is at the core of what they do.

Take someone like Uli Kempendorff, formerly the jazz correspondent at field notes and one of the most prolific musicians in the city’s scene. A saxophonist, he plays an instrument that more often than not plays the leading role in many constellations, however Kempendorff is a team player through and through. In 2019, he joined the Julia Hülsmann Quartet, which has now returned with a new LP for ECM. »Under the Surface« is marked by an egalitarian approach that results in music full of nuances, contributed by the individual players’ distinct voices.

Kempendorff’s own quartet Field with Christopher Dell on vibraphone, Jonas Westergaard on bass and drummer Peter Bruun is also back with a new album, »Who Are You Sending This Time?« on Unit. The eight pieces are just as characterised by mutual respect and paying attention to each other, however are more interested in a textural approach—creating distinct sound events that correspond with one another in ways that create a holistic overall aesthetic. This makes this album seem a little wilder than »Under the Surface« with its relatively laid-back, compositionally-minded approach.

It also turns »Who Are You Sending This Time?« into a link between the latter and »The Excruciating Pain of Boredom« (out on May 16th) by the Felix Henkelhausen Quintet, of which Kempendorff is also a member. Recorded live between Cologne and Berlin, it is an improvisation-driven album that is unapologetically fierce. Taken together, these three records underline Kempendorff’s flexibility and adaptability while also proving that in the world of jazz, they’re well versed in building their own infrastructures and floating freely between them.

The practice of improvisation heavily depends on interdependence, i.e. the interplay of people who play close attention to each other’s contributions. »Rotations+« is another example of this. Featuring Sven-Åke Johansson—whose take on his own »Stumps« compositions alongside Axel Dörner, Joel Grip, Pierre Borel, and Simon Sieger is released by the Austrian Trost simultaneously to this album—as well as trumpeter Franz Hautzinger and turntablist Ignaz Schick, this recording of an improvised set at Neukölln’s KM28 is a wonderful example of how three very different musicians can follow simple ideas to their logical conclusions.

Berlin-based echtzeitmusik progenitor Ignaz Schick has also collaborated with Hamburg trombonist and sound artist Felix Mayer for the release of »Pips and Strains« on Leipzig’s Grubenwehr Freiburg [sic!]. While the first piece sees them combine their efforts for a wonderfully lysergic, textural piece, Mayer’s solo contribution combines bowed instruments and objects with gramophone and phonograph noises, whereas Schick is showing a more aggressive side on his solo piece, working with turntables and a sampler to create a dynamic noise collage.

»Pips and Strains« is a release full of contrasts, much like the ones on electronic music maverick Ivan Pavlov a.k.a. CoH and Berlin-based Midori Hirano. Over the course of the enigmatically titled »Sudden Fruit« for Ici d’ailleurs, the two navigate between concretion and abstractions, embedding Hirano’s piano sounds into electronic environments that create emotional and atmospheric ambivalences. It underlines how—pun intended—fruitful it can be if aesthetic differences are not only mutually acknowledged, but utilised together through the act of creative integration.

The same holds true in regard to »The Dream Border,« a new three-way collaborative album on Cedric Fermont’s Syrphe, itself a platform that serves as a unifying force for a diverse range of musical approaches. Featuring the label owner on gongs and electronics as well as Dora Bleu on vocals and guitar and Periklis Tsoukalas on the medusa, an instrument that he co-designed with the help of Melike and Simge Güler and Hüseyin Yıldız, these ten pieces are probably best understood as music that aims to be liminal; serving as a threshold between one world and the other, if only between pop songwriting and drone music.

These kinds of musical exchanges have become increasingly common. Further recent examples include Berlin-based composer-performer and drummer Max Andrzejewski’s »Summen,« a wonderfully wild project realised with the help of four Ensemble Resonanz members, synthesizer magician Hainbach’s massive »Primer« album in collaboration with Ensemble Modern, or Gellért Szabó and his Ideal Orchestra with their expansive »Live at Berghain« (actually recorded at the Kantine am Berghain, but we’ll let them off the hook this time!). They share certain ideals in regard to more egalitarian ways of connecting musical traditions, artists and their instruments as well as different audiences.

The same can be said about the AGGREGATE series organised by gamut inc.’s Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki, who are currently preparing the fifth edition of their festival for »automated pipe organs in 21st century music.« Everyone who has missed some or even all of the previous instalments can catch up with some performances thanks to the release of »AGGREGATE – New Works for Automated Pipe Organs« through Naxos, a collection featuring on-site recordings of works by Conlon Nancarrow, Jessica Ekomane, gamut inc., and others. It’s a sprawling 2CD set that feels both massive and intimate—and of course again underlines that festivals such as this one are fields of experimentation on more than one level.

The same spirit reverberates through »Selected Recordings from Grapefruit,« a comprehensive compilation of performances by The Great Learning Orchestra based on Yoko Ono’s path-breaking »Grapefruit« text compositions released by Karlrecords. Not only does this release represent an essential document of a crucial time in music history, the conjunction of Ono’s feminist approach and the Great Learning Orchestra egalitarian ambitions—as dogmatic as they might sometimes seem—also serve as a reminder that there is a rich tradition of socially and politically engaged avant-garde music.

This history also informs the two compilations »24.1: Resistance 1« and »24.2: Resistance 2« on the Tehran-founded and now Berlin-based label Noise à Noise. They feature a whopping 47 tracks in total, bringing together an international roster of electronic and experimental music as well as contemporary music composers. Not to be mistaken with an overtly political statement, the two-part release puts a focus on the »silent strength of listening, compassion, and endurance« and is dedicated to several communities that face oppression and conflict, including the Kurdish population, Palestinian as well as Israeli people, and population of Ukraine.

The future of Ukraine is still very much uncertain at the time of writing, however the type of resistance outlined by Noise à Noise’s stunning double compilation remains fierce. Music and the connections forged and fortified through it continue to play a crucial role in this context. Besides compilations such as KYIVPASTRANS’ »Drones for Drones, Volume 3,« featuring a piece by former initiative neue musik board member Sagardía, this also includes a follow-up to the massive »Field Notes« music compilation and interview anthology edited by writer Gianmarco Del Re for система system. »Ukrainian Field Notes Volume II« chronicles the second year of the invasion of the country.

Documenting and archiving history-in-the-making is also one of the impetuses behind Raed Yassin’s overwhelming »Phantom Orchestra« album for Rabih Beaini’s Morphine Records. Created from more than 1.000 minutes of improvised recordings made at Morphine Raum in the fall of 2021 by some of the key players in the Berlin scene, it best encapsulates the diversity-as-unity concept that this instalment of the Found Sounds column is all about: This is a veritable masterpiece that will resonate for months and years as a gripping showcase of how individual contributions to collective projects make them add up to much more than the mere sum of its parts.

This also leads us back to the question of the platforms that we have come to rely on too much in our life. If the previous examples prove anything to us, it’s that the music world can teach us how the collaboration between different actors can strengthen the bonds between us and actively push things forward. However, these alliances are more often than not temporary, which is why it is also instructive to look at examples of cooperation—of musicians building, controlling, and steering their own platforms.

One example of this can be found in the Berlin scene in the form of the smallest functional unit. Magda Mayas, Mazen Kerbaj, Racha Gharbieh, Tony Buck, and Ute Wassermann came together in 2020 under this tongue-in-cheek name to form their own small publishing house and put out the »Graphème« anthologies of visual scores. These publications are expressly meant to foster more collaboration between composers and performers. The recently released fourth edition features new pieces by Elo Masing, Rana Al Bana, Raven Chacon, and others.

Magda Mayas’ »Murmurs«, using images of flocks of birds in flight, feels particularly evocative. What are those so-called murmurations other than diversity-in-unity in action? It’s a principle that we all will likely need to adapt in the coming times if we want to stay resilient, if not resistant to what’s to come. Building our own, flexible platforms should very much be a part of this—which is why following the examples of the cooperatively run streaming platform Catalytic Soundstream as well as artist-owned marketplaces such as Mirlo and the soon-to-be-launched Subvert and Tone are more than worthy of our attention, too.

Much like the music presented in this edition of Found Sounds, these platforms can serve as instructive models for more collective control over how we create and facilitate connections between different groups of people. What we need to grapple with, both in regard to the economics of music as well as more generally on a societal level, is that we need to break away from the monopoly the big platforms have on our collective imagination—and that this isn’t necessarily a complicated feat to pull off. Speaking of which, I’ll now send a quick email to the friend I’ve recently seen at CTM Festival.