Leonie Strecker — Chroma

Music, like film, is a durational art. In the simplest of terms, something begins, and then it ends, regardless of how formally complex a given work is: this is Inescapable. Plastic arts like painting or sculpture are bound by other limitations. In music, or sound more broadly, what happens between start and stop often works to subvert the unavoidable temporal constraints circumscribed by the act of listening, as Leonie Strecker has done on Chroma: a patchwork of minimalist electronics, abstract but highly textured

Over five compositions ( three long-form, two shorter), Strecker pushes back against the forward march, creating moments of sonic intensity in favor of musical progression. Instead of ideas building into conflicts that are worked through, preserved, or sometimes even resolved, Chroma showcases how discrete sonic impulses first present themselves, bloom, so to speak, before any consideration is given to what musical ends they will serve.

In practice, this means that there are few, if any, grand gestures to be heard on Chroma; Strecker leans heavily on repetition and microtonalities. Noise generators can be heard throughout, a clever tool given its ability to be both undifferentiated background as well as a figural foreground piercing through the miasma. On this point, it is worth noting that for all its guns blazing against teleology, things sort of have to be listenable in the end, and for all of its focus, Chroma can slip into obscurantism without familiar anchors. Take “MONO”: the album’s penultimate composition, which features a Merzbow-like wall of noise, only to return to the faint refrain to a voice muttering in German inside an airport.

Fans of abstract, minimalist work may take to the investigative character of Stecker’s sounds.