Christoph Dahlberg — Blackforms

[Teleskop — 2022]★★★★★

Reviewed 5 December 2022by Colin Lang

The fugue is a musical structure and a mental state, the latter describing an existential sense of disconnectedness, a loss of one's identity or grounding. It is to this definition that the late poet and Holocaust-survivor, Paul Celan, oriented himself in his "Death Fugues," a foundational point of reference for Christoph Dahlberg on his latest work, Blackforms. Celan famously declared that "Death is a Master from Germany", a line whose resonance has never been fully understood, perhaps because its meaning requires a breadth of articulation that language alone cannot disclose. Enter music. Dahlberg takes us on an afflicted journey into the cavernous reaches of mourning and loss, a passage that moves slowly toward nothingness.

How Dahlberg gets there is the real "content" of Blackforms, which uses electronics and classical cello crescendos to point toward a dim light that is routinely snuffed out, until there is not much left to extinguish. I don't have to reveal that my own lineage to a shtetl in Lithuania that was the subject of such extermination (although I just did) to justify my implicit understanding of the complexity that Dahlberg sets out to explores. Somehow, music feels especially suited to such a daunting task: Getting to the depths of that space which cannot be represented or expressed without the attendant danger of falling into kitsch or spectacle, or both. Midway through Blackforms, a subtle beat emerges from the miasma of the darkness on "Gods End" and continues through the dirge of "Kristall" – perhaps a reference to the November Pogroms? – which then gives way to the final emptiness of "The Future is Now". Which future? Which now?

Dahlberg is also an artist, and the reference points of Anselm Kiefer and Celan lend context to Blackforms. I couldn't help thinking of the silence of Celan's poetry, but also the real silence that shrouded the poet's conversation with his intellectual hero, Martin Heidegger, when the two met in 1967 at the philosopher's home in the Black Forest. But you don't have to be a history buff, or an afflicted subject of said history, to appreciate the abyss that Blackforms both describes and explores. For any fan of minimalist electronic music with acoustic instrumentation, and the desire to visit haunted spaces and homes, without the expectation that the illumination of Enlightened thinking will show you the way out. To jump in

← Back to reviews