vist ag

Annette Giesriegl
Clementine Gasser
Karl Sayer
Michael Fischer

cs118

There is no need for arrangements working with new languages, it is a matter of experience. Only within the plain and sudden exchange with the opposite, the outline of the new and still not-experienced shows itself; it can be constructed and changed. The composition of the moment is the strongest and most direct musical expression of this realization. To focus on and implement the next step clearly and consciously, to shape valid structures within this process is a challenge and strength for which the theoretical and practical experience-based, uncompromising improvisation is the best resource.
The first recording of VIST AG affirms in a convincing way that Instant Composing is still one of the most complex and veritable correspondences for the search for an adequate language in contemporary music.
Nothing is static here, everything disintegrates but also stands firmly: the chemistry of the four players, who move as passive-active border crossers at the areas of conflict between meditation and impulsiveness. This is once more the most genuine explanation for the enormously independent and highly individual character of this unbelievably convincing music. Exclusive lethargy is likewise prevented as cheap expressiveness. It is the members’ analysis ability of their precise and sensuous clear realization, which enables this extraordinary shine and the bubbling energy within this imperturbability.
Different aspects are explored in a concentrated and highly conscious manner intensively and extensively by this vivid, creative cell. The perhaps weightiest background is the material creation and form giving, documented by the literature of composed music of the 2nd half of the 20th century, if e.g. serialistic concepts experience an improvisatory vibration. There is the large ability to transform non-European and ethnical musical traditions e.g. of the Japanese NO theatre or the intonation of the professional and local Hungarian music of the Roma. A large topic and center is also the common breath and the flowing transition from noise to clear sound and vice versa. Allowing the stretch of parameters in an explicit sense not only to permit contradictions, but to connect them dialectically, the calm, floating appearance and the impulse to physicalness and eruption. The interaction of string instruments and voice moves here very intensively in an attitude of electro-acoustic sound production. But dynamics, modulation, concentration and intensity of the sound language, VIST AG however is capable to work out in a much more varied way.
According to Derek Bailey the best music develops if the ensemble plays together for the first time. According to Evan Parker's opinion it will be if the ensemble plays together for a long time. For Michael Fischer, whose long term wish was an ensemble of voice and string instruments, both is possible, and VIST AG is the alive proof.
Freely from the first moment on.

Marcus Maida