su dance110 (aka Dan Su) has crafted a short, minimalist EP, Stille Oper, which comes in at a meagre 20 minutes. The music that appears on this release was originally commissioned to accompany a performance/installation in Berlin, all the way back in 2020, just before the world came to a standstill.
Divided into four tracks, Stille Oper (Silent Opera) is not really an opera, nor is it exactly silent, though the German here could also mean "quiet", which is certainly more fitting. The mood is a creepy one, like a series of jabs from a knife hidden from view, poking through a drab foundation of rumbling white noise. The source material is as minimalist as their application, playing on the organizing principle of attack/decay by systematically reducing its properties into a series of carefully attenuated interruptions.
In part due to its economy of time, Stille Oper somehow manages to never settle into anything that might become predictable, using the element of surprise like a finely sharpened tool, inserted when least expected. In other words, there is no getting used to the presentation and subsequent displacement of sonic textures, which feel aleatory in nature – just as surprising to my ears even after repeated listens – though I am sure they are the product of a well-thought-out, conceptual framework. The affective impact of being startled and a bit leery of what is to come, though, risks obscuring the almost structuralist dissection of attack and decay, in which su dance110 isolates and reduces each sonic moment into pure event.
Stille Oper will certainly appeal to fans of minimal electro-acoustic music, which effectively straddles the genres of avant-garde classical and dark ambient. Even those fond of horror soundtracks will find something here, with a base level of uneasiness and plenty of surprises. For
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