Asmus Tietchens — Soirée
The fifty minute disk bears eight cryptically-named and sounding pieces created through rendering a selection of earlier works unrecognisable via a ten-part recycling process. And one can assume he must have been pleased with the results as he asks on the brief sleeve notes “Is it really necessary to create further new electronic music if only one piece as a nucleus is sufficient to derive hundreds and hundreds of different distinct individual variants?” Given his vast discography this approach perhaps poses more questions as to the composer’s intentions behind his work as much as the specific methodologies involved, where presumably chance now joins mathematics in determining his output.
And while there seems to be some kind of algebraic naming convention here – there’s a ‘P’-series of three, another three ‘L2r’s and a couple of Nox’s – the titles seem wholly interchangeable: P1’s sleight shafts of soft, aerial tones form a light, breathy cascade both solemn and contemplative, only to be interrupted by the briefest of cracks or ticks. The opening track, P1b, displays similar wafty properties, but is much more sibilant and ominous, where its snake-like elegance is intruded upon by a sharp, shrill train whistle, while P2a closes the set with a series of rhythmically regular passages yet is, on the whole, still closer to the eerie sounds of an empty corridor on a sci-fi spacecraft.
Whatever the source or the process, the results consistently combine fragile, at times barely detectable, passages of amorphous synthetic vapours with sudden surges and unexpected glitches that briefly but strongly pierce through the ambience. Like phantoms of their former selves they make a haunting, if unintelligible listening environment.