regen |cs081

Le violoniste Harald Kimmig fut sélectionné voici presque vingt ans par Cecil Taylor pour jouer au sein de son quintet Corona. Depuis lors, il a développé sa pratique d’improvisateur et est devenu un collaborateur de choix de plusieurs improvisateurs (Lê Quan Ninh). En tandem avec le pianiste suisse Christoph Schiller, à l’épinette dans Regen (CS 081), il nous livre des improvisations dont l’intention se mesure autant dans le geste que dans le son. Malgré ce parti pris singulier de rétention de l’expression sonore dans le flux physique du jeu instrumental, la connivence et l’imagination vont à l’essentiel. J-M Van Schouwburg (Improjazz)

Harald Kimmig plays violin and Christoph Schiller plays spinet (go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinet for enlightenment). Funnily enough, this arrived in my mailbox on the same day as Hidden Fresco (Nemu) which features the medieval flutes of Norbert Rodenkirchen and the gothic fiddle of Albrecht Maurer. But while their playing is solidly rooted in the idioms of Baroque music, Schiller's concept of the spinet is aggressively 21st century; the venerable instrument is prepared with a variety of objects and ends up sounding like a cross between an acoustic guitar (imagine one played by Keith Rowe) and a toy piano. The music is, for the most part, nervy, twitchy stuff, trading twangs, snaps and scratches, but on "streifen" Schiller combats his instrument's natural lack of sustain by using what sounds like an Ebow to produce some eerie theremin-like wailing, whose sustained pitches Kimmig skilfully picks out with artificial harmonics. It's serious and careful, but often feels like it doesn't quite know where it's going. Which is fine if you subscribe to the in-the-moment aesthetic of improvised music (as elegantly expounded by Malcolm Goldstein, whose playing Kimmig's often recalls), but the tracks that work best are those – "code", "regen" – which explore the micro-world of delicate shudders and tiny pizzicati interspersed with silence. Dan Warburton (Paris Transatlantic)

Through their systematic deconstruction of violin and spinet's technical canons, Harald Kimmig and Christoph Schiller try to react as creatively as they can against the constrictions of Western counterpoint, all the while utilizing microsounds and (un)common practices to stay nearer to headquarters that might show a "lowercase" flickering neon lamp outside the front door. Instead, in a track like "Schütten" a succession of evident contrasts is brought to the fore in a more typical free music setting. Exploring the realms of high frequency, which comes easier given the range of both instruments, the duo moves through snippets of phrases and stringed chit-chat-hit-and-pluck to realize a fascinating language that fuses abstruse aspects of chamber music with a constant fall from grace, despite the fact that knowledgeable ears won't certainly find too many new reasons to cry miracle. This doesn't mean that Kimmig and Schiller don't produce interesting integrations; indeed they share a remarkable dexterity that allows them to find lots of sweet spots, from which raindrops of sparkling clicks and juxtapositions of bowed frailties ("Regen", "Streifen") fuse into the mummified simultaneousness of an obscure experimental movie soundtrack. Most of all, this album sounds like a learning process where all the components are lined up to symbolize elements that don't really exist; gradually, the duo become aware that their reward is to be found elsewhere, and they look for it by refracting their instrumental abilities through the shards of a broken compatibility. Massimo Ricci (Touching Extremes)

Harald Kimmig & Christoph Schiller – REGEN. O nome do violinista Harald Kimmig liga-se remotamente ao quinteto Corona, de Cecil Taylor, com Muneer Abdul Fataah, William Parker e Tony Oxley, registado em concerto no festival Total Music Meeting, em Berlim, 1989, e editado em CD pela Free Music Production (FMP) sob o título Looking (Berlin Version). De então para cá muitas e variadas têm sido as colaborações de Kimming com gente do mundo da música improvisada. Em REGEN (Creative Sources # 081), Kimming contracena com o pianista Christoph Schiller, músico do free jazz, da new music e da música improvisada. Em vez do piano, Schiller optou pela espineta, preparada de modo tal que passa a soar a qualquer coisa algures entre a percussão e a guitarra acústica. A espineta, que Schiller usa desde 2002, é um instrumento de tecla parente do cravo, com um som que lhe é timbricamente próximo, se tocado de forma convencional. Não é o que aqui acontece. As cordas são percutidas, passadas a arco de modo a soar a algo entre a guitarra acústica, a electrónica e a percussão, e envolvidas com as raízes tonais do violino. Este entra e sai da harmonia convencional, sem qualquer tipo de preocupação relacionada com a marcação do tempo, acentuando a delicadeza deste preparado acústico. Juntos fazem cair uma chuva de microtonalidades que ocasionalmente toma corpo e se desenvolve ao sabor dos acontecimentos. Em planos oblíquos, os instrumentos derivam para texturas de ruído ora para a pura exploração tímbrica. Turbulência mínima, sensação de movimento com um ou outro pico, como o que ocorre na segunda destas cinco improvisações de construção minimalista, ao longo das quais os músicos experimentam com som e se invectivam reciprocamente a arriscar partindo de conceitos básicos próprios da arte da improvisação livre, como são o saber ouvir e reagir. Daqui nasce o diálogo constante entre os gestos que se advinham e os sons correspondentes. Fluidez e convulsão como duas faces de uma moeda com valor e circulação. Eduardo Chagas (JazzeArredores)

Somewhere else in a different context, somebody was speaking about the "voice of the voiceless", well here It Is, a vivid example of this voice. Kimmig (violin) and Schiller (spinet) are fully immersed in the electro-acoustic thing which is the best quality and also a small limit of this release. It start very silently and later on it opens to what I really meant with the "voice of the voiceless" sentence, as you can hear the musicians let the wood of their instruments speak. It doesn't imply the don't strike/bow strings since they do it, but above all in some parts of the release they prevent strings and anything else to sound as we're used to hear it. The two players here give priority to scratching their instruments, there they play some really fast incursion (above all Kimmig), they inentionally start to engulf to avoid falling in what they probably consider a predictable solution. Not exactly crippled, what you may fin in this music goes from a short stab to an intangible presence where they are incredibly retained, anyhow, it's also true that after the first half of the time length, play something that sounds really classic contemporary music, it has to do with the solutions adopted by the players during their many intersections. As said this cd is on the edge between free-improvisation and and contemporary composition If that's your cup of tea you'll drink it easily. Andrea Ferraris (Chain DLK)