Quadrat:sch — Stubenmusic

On this their debut release the Austrian string quartet Quadrat:sch seem to be formed of two halves: there’s zither-player Christof Dienz who composed half of the pieces on the first disc, and, on double-bass duties his wife, Alexandra, while the remaining pieces are composed by the duo of guitarist Gunter Schneider and Dulcimer-hammerer Barbara Romen. Regardless of who’s written the songs, when they play together they create short, anecdotal “chamber folk” music based on traditions that reach back to the eighteenth century.

Indeed, as the extensive sleevenotes explain, ‘Stubenmusic’ translates as ‘parlor music’ to describe the sort of sounds that were played for fun in the best room of a farm house. Initially, it reminds of the Penguin Café Orchestra’s jauntier numbers – a kind of classically-trained folk dance style that is rather sweet and jolly. The first two tracks, ‘Soodersooderso’ and ‘Schwungradl’, both brim with major-scale happiness as they skip along gaily. This quick haughty pace is often kept aloft by the hard slapping of the strings to create fuller-bodied rhythms that are regularly revisited throughout the disk’s twelve tracks. But by the time ‘Der Dis-tanz’ (track nine) all this wholesome smiling and swaying gets a bit sickening and starts to describe opulent wood-panelled nurseries where rich children dance under the watchful eye of their nannies. There are one or two diversions from this saccharine swing though, Dienz’ ‘Peaceful Piece’ being the most affecting with its slow sustained tones bending and wavering with a melancholic edge left otherwise unadorned until a casual fingerpicking interchange conjures a fairytale feel.

The second disk, titled ‘Quadrat:sch Extended’ sees the prolific harpist Zeena Parkins and jazz percussionist Herbert Pirker join the ranks to perform nine further pieces all composed by Christof Dienz, each inspired by the Tyrolean artist Kassian Erhart’s sound sculptures using wood, metal, stone and water. Here Quadrat:sch’s Alpine-fresh traditional instrumentation is infused with non-traditional sound sources that seem to encourage the players to adopt a much more freeform mode of playing that combine to make this second disk much more interesting than the first but, perhaps, just as frustrating. These non-traditional sound-sources are allocated a track each, making the disk like some kind of smorgasbord of everyday objects waiting for their sounds to be liberated:  there’s the centrifugal sonics of a ball rolling around a wooden bowl, or the rough texture of scraped stone, the percussive drips and splashes of water and the boings of milk spiralling through a metal can. But just as each of these starts to display interesting characteristics and contours the players’ loose tones arch, collide, fuss and fight in a way that seems indifferent to the objects’ emanations. Whilst the experimental nerve of attempting such a fusion of concrète sounds with traditional instrumentation is to be applauded, the results here struggle to integrate detracting from the rich properties each instrument and non-instrument holds.