Immobile
Immobile, two musicians are sitting at a table
smothered in CD and MiniDisc players, adapters, cables and a mini-mixer bristling
with knobs. Out of nowhere a noise wobbles softly. The sound drifts in and out
of your mind without a beginning or an end. There is more a notion of music
in the hall than actual music itself. Slowly the sound becomes definite. The
other players, on piano and drums, chime in with noises of their own. You could
call it an electronic and instrumental performance, musique concrète
or ambient music. We are here at a 'concert of invention' performed by Berliner
Theorie (Rupert Huber and Sam Auinger) with guests Wolfgang Mitterer and Markus
Binder.
There is something organic about the way the squelched samples of industrial
noises change according to some casual blueprint. What grabs you is not so much
the subtlety of the changes, but the fact that they seem natural. No-one seems
all too concerned about consciously expressing something. But, for those in
the audience who are aware of the history of electronic music, you can hear
strands reaching back to 1948, when Pierre Schaeffer invented musique concrète
in French radio's Club D'Essai. Ever since, that music has grown quietly in
the shadows of New Music, Modern Jazz and Pop like a bulb in a pot of soil.
And here it is alive and well, a tulip in the hands of Huber and Auinger.
Mathias R. Entress (translated and edited by S. Ferguson)
