“When I was a teenager I used to sit on an empty field listening for hours to the sounds of distant cars, railroads and helicopters. These sounds, which are very rough and noisy when they are near, attracted me from the distance because they had merged and diffused into a continuum when they reached my ears”, remembers Wieland Samolak.
Having familiarised himself with synthesisers whilst working at the Munich branch of Synthesizer Studio Bonn from the 1980s onwards, Samolak translated these auditory impressions into the deep, electronic soundscapes that characterise his only released album, Steady State Music.
The pieces lack melodies, harmonies or rhythms, and they seem like living, breathing organisms. When they were released in 1993, they were far ahead of their time and played a decisive role in shaping the later textural ambient music.
American composer Phill Niblock’s works, too, are inspired by a moment of realisation triggered by listening. He recalls a time when he was riding his motorbike up a hill behind a slow-moving diesel lorry: “Both of our throttles were very open. Soon, the revolutions of our respective engines came to a nearly harmonic coincidence. But not quite. The strong physical presence of the beats resulting from the two engines running at slightly different frequencies put me in such a trance that I nearly rode off the side of the mountain.”
Since 1968, Niblock has been incorporating this epiphany into a musical style consisting of overlapping layers of sustained instrumental sounds. These are usually multitracked recordings, so-called clouds of the same instrument playing notes at closely spaced pitches. The resulting pieces have neither melody nor changes in dynamics or tempo, and create an atmosphere that feels as though it is vibrating or ‘shimmering’ from within.
Niblock’s work Not Tied, Knot Untied – Old, written in 1999 for the Berlin based Zeitkratzer (time scratcher) ensemble, marked a transition for the composer from such tied tape recordings to untied live acoustic performances.
The group newly formed by pianist Reinhold Friedl was the ideal collaborator for this venture. Zeitkratzer set about interpreting electronic and noise music using purely acoustic instruments like accordion, violin, piano and percussion.
Unlike a traditional orchestra with a rigid hierarchy, Zeitkratzer operates as an expanded ensemble of soloists, in which musicians and sound engineers become co-creators of the pieces and contribute their own improvisational skills. In the years that followed, the group collaborated with legendary figures from the noise, industrial and experimental scenes, such as Lou Reed, Kraftwerk and Merzbow.
Hennix aims to attune her audience to harmonious vibrations that can evoke a transformative, ‘distinctionless’ state of being, which she describes as divine equilibrium
For Solo For Two Tamburas, which was recorded in Berlin in 2010, the Swedish artist Catherine Christer Hennix performed the technically demanding feat of playing two such instruments at the same time.
The composer, mathematician and poet had been exploring the drone of the tambura since the 1970s, when she studied the nature of its harmonic sound with Pandit Pran Nath.
As a master of classical Hindustani music, Pran Nath designed his own tamburas. His devotional practice of carefully tuning and then sounding them in a continuous and even flow guided Hennix’s work with sound ever since.
For her, playing two tamburas simultaneously was a meditative process. It required a specific kind of mental and physical balance, in which her left and right hands, as well as the hemispheres of her brain, had to work in perfect harmony.
Sometimes this technique causes the layers of sound produced by the tamburas to overlap in such a way that combination tones are created – ghostly frequencies that the human ear ‘invents’ when two pure tones collide.
Through her work, Hennix aims to attune her audience to harmonious vibrations that can evoke a transformative, ‘distinctionless’ state of being, which she describes as divine equilibrium.
Playlist
Wieland Samolak – Untitled 2
from the album Steady State Music (1993, Imbalance Recordings)
Phill Niblock – Not Tied, Knot Untied – Old
from the album SoundinX (1999, Timescraper Records)
Catherine Christer Hennix – Solo for Two Tamburas
from the album Solo For Two Tamburas (2010, Care Of Editions)
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