An unmarked basement door ushered us into a long, narrow strip of musty darkness.
Down the middle of this space were separated islands of instrumentation: drum kits, horns – both French and old-style motor horns – plus a fiddle, a couple of electric guitars and a vacuum cleaner. An electric drill and a sander as well, I think; at some point there was a whine on a different plane from the siren wail of the elderly vacuum. The opening moments of Torsten Lauschmann's new work belong to human voices: one singing, almost liturgically, the other reading text.
In a way these voices are a deceptive anchorage. This is really a journey into an uncharted soundscape where lights will flicker on and off, and a seemingly random sequence of little riffs, percussings and parpings will ensue from the Red Note Ensemble. Since they stand in disciplined isolation, it's as if Lauschmann has instigated a game of Chinese Whispers.
He's also interested in the tensions between mechanistic processes and live performers so there's a recurring jolt for the listener between fragments of familiar live performance and intrusive, industrial/domestic engine noise. Even as your ear tries to pursue patternings in such juxtapositions, it shifts and the lights add their own disorientating effect. You leave, puzzling over your perceptions and responses while thinking bravo.
HHH
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