1 Rotophorm 1 9:30
2 Rotophorm 2 6:33
3 Rotophorm 3 5:16
4 Rotophorm 4 9:02
5 Rotophorm 5 2:58
6 Rotophorm 6 6:48
On first listen to this collaboration between electroacoustic guitarist Annette Krebs and “inner piano” player Andrea Neumann, I am immediately reminded of Virgil Thomson’s semi-infamous critique of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano: “a ping qualified by a thud.” Despite it’s pithy and almost dismissive nature, Thompson’s summary precisely captures the dialogue between the pitched and unpitched voices rising from Cage’s metal and wood piano string treatments – a dialogue that would later blossom into the lingua franca of free improvisation. More than fifty years after the Sonatas and Interludes , Neumann and Krebs speak a rendition of the “ping versus thud” language so radically evolved that the resultant collection of industrial grind and crackle bears only passing resemblance to the tinkling Orientalisms of their Cagean ancestor. Heaven only knows what Thomson would make of Rotophormen , a record filled with sounds not unlike a dilapidated boiler room full of randomly chiming antique alarm clocks – all wrought from the seemingly harmless acoustic guitar and piano.
To refer to the instruments played by Krebs and Neumann as simply an acoustic guitar and piano, however, is to be grossly misleading. Krebs rests her acoustic guitar face-up on her lap, outfits it with a bounty of contact microphones and pickups routed through signal processors and a mixing desk, and assaults both its strings and body with steel wool, hand-held fans, and more. Neumann’s “inner piano” consists of the piano strings stripped of keyboard and frame, a raw sounding board for her relentless barrage of manual scrapes, slaps, and metallic interjections. Like Krebs, Neumann litters her instrument with numerous sensors that amplify microscopic movements across mistreated strings into richly textured sonorities that could easily be mistaken for laptop squiggles. In the case of both players, the sound palette wrung from these treated instruments represents a photo negative of the instruments’ traditional role – the resonance of the guitar’s body and the open piano string inverted to mostly pitch-free gestures of Morse code static and rotor scrape. Only the most fleeting allusion to the instrumental raw materials emerges: the occasional open string rings briefly from the piano, a hint of string scrapes from the guitar. What’s left is a swarm of metallic insects clawing at sheet metal, a malfunctioning radio heard under high-tension power lines – perhaps both at once.
Rotophormen lists six tracks (each given a simple number designation) on its sleeve, but the track divisions may as well not exist – the ever-changing musical topography defies simple partitions. Neumann and Krebs’ noise concoctions shun the harmony-derived structures of tension and release in favor a constant exploration of the unique instant; the resulting effects is that of opening and closing the same door, yet discovering a different landscape of pings and thuds behind it with each examination. Similarly, the carefully regulated uniformity of generated sounds contributes to the impression of large-scale unity. At points, the sounds become so detached from their source that it becomes difficult to impossible to tell which player conjures a particular white noise burst or muted rattle, an effect magnified by the virtual space manipulations afforded by electronic treatments. Ultimately, this uniformity begins to work against the duo; reliance on the same mode of communication, though effective, occasionally leads Neumann and Krebs into redundant dead ends. Such dead ends, however, are relatively few and far between – for the most part, Neumann and Krebs inhabit an environment of constantly overturning noise, guided by an internal logic that escapes narrative convention in favor of intuitive fluctuations of tone color and dynamic.
As for the sounds themselves – metal-on-metal scratches and otherworldly rumbles, delivered with an unaffected precision that befits their industrial character. Generally the most active of the players, Neumann offers up a diverse array of dragged chain scuffs, wound string scratches, and bursts of steam jet white noise that create a complex inner world of buzz and rattle seemingly without origin. For contrast, Neumann conjures dense harmonic clusters from the blades of electric fans on open strings or electronically sustains a resonant hum from the sounding board until it crumbles beneath flurries of mechanical din. Krebs, on the other hand, prefers to fill the negative space between Neumann’s more overt gestures with crunchy rustles wrought from steel wool or subsonic bass pulses coaxed from the amplified guitar body. Krebs should not be mistaken for a passive player, however, as the points at which her electroacoustic guitar takes the forefront are every bit as captivating as Neumann’s more aggressive fare – whether it be creating a thicket of bristly static on the first track or summoning a crowd of chattering crickets at the album’s conclusion. Together, they create networks of mechanical noise alternately evoking the sharp-edged click and miniscule spring groan of stopwatch or the strained pulses of failing drill press. It’s a dense and claustrophobic affair, yet the inhuman surface glare created by Neumann and Krebs’ unforgiving manipulations masks a wealth of atomic detail within each disembodied blurt and squeal. For those willing to dig beneath its spiky exterior, Rotophormen offers a glimpse of the twitching alien sound shapes lurking beneath the duo’s suggested clamorous machinery.
Perhaps this truly is the music of Virgil Thomson’s nightmares, his “ping qualified by a thud” stretched to its coldest post-human extremes. Judging by the ease and fluidity of Neumann and Krebs’ interactions, however, we may be more apt to view the rattling noisescapes of Rotophormen as a logical extension of the new language Thompson inadvertently prophesied more than half a century ago. Though the mechanical environment called to mind may lack human warmth and sentimentality, it is not without its elements of fascination or even flickers of beauty – often evoking a feeling akin to the haunted quality that hovers around abandoned factories. Though Thomson may have disapproved, Krebs and Neumann’s Rotophormen presents a dialog in pings and thuds as consistently interesting as it is remote, unlocking the hidden instrumental potential hinted at in Thomson’s peculiarly farsighted observation.
Stylus Magazine
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