ROHRER / TROBOLLOWITSCH / NAMTCHYLAK — Jeito de Ferver
Free improvisation instrumentalist Thomas Rohrer has teamed up with electro-acoustic composer Andreas Trobollowitsch and vocalist Sainkho Namtchylak. Jeito de Ferver is an album of richly textured field recordings and free instrumental noise in a gestural musique concrete collage. Unlike many field recording albums which focus on nature, here we have many sounds of civilization: distant motor vehicles, air conditioners, throbbing metallic vibration, the scraping and colliding of man-made materials, and many digitally processed derivations there of.
It features six relatively short pieces (four-to- five minutes apiece) making for a short album of twenty-eight minutes. However, each of its pieces is rapidly paced, with new sounds constantly fading in and out, and each sound transfiguring in its shape as time passes. The mood that subtlely emerges from the arrangements is eerie and nocturnal, with odd dissonant intervals struck between the glimmering resonances in the various drones and freeform instrumental performances.
Titular opener "Jeito de Ferver" is layered with various ear-tickling forms of static. Lovely tones such as the tuned bass gong in "Ovaa" achieve a clever musicality through the electronic tempering of chaotic acoustic sounds. Though often existing mostly in free rhythm, a few times broken beats emerge from the heavily processed samples. The end of this track has the unexpected use of rasping, panting breaths, bringing an animalistic immediacy to the largely detached environmental sounds heard previously. This must be vocalist Sainkho Namtchylak.
"Lih" introduces wailing, breathy sounds from a trumpet. Sainkho's raspy voice returns in "Tul", this time rising to a crackling shriek one might expect to hear from a black metal vocalist, in the album's most aggressive moment. In "Schnelllaub", granular scrambling creates the impression of cycles of a wide variety of lengths happening simultaneously.
This album is a kind of industrial musique concrete for the modern age. Fans of groups like Nurse With Wound and Organum should find much to enjoy about this album, which contains the same detuned metallic drones and mysterious esoteric energy. The restless experimentalism of the sound creation found here is enough to make each piece like its own realm entirely. It is a vivid, immediate production with a perfect frequency response and stereo field. No time is wasted as the artists move rapidly through novel sound creation approaches. Check it out here