Feuer Zungen Glocken Saiten review

An adventure, a journey into worlds of sound beyond the imagination: The album Feuer Zungen Glocken Saiten, released by the Canadian experimental label earsay, offers around sixty minutes of electroacoustic music. The composer Rainer Bürck, an experienced individual in the scene and present at international festivals for many years, presents works from 2000 to 2021. Of a total of five compositions, two were written for performers and live electronics, and another three are acousmatic pieces, i.e. without live performers. The title refers, among other things, to the acoustic sources used, including accordion, church bells, guitar and violin. If you want, you can also interpret the pair of terms "Fire Tongues" as an allusion to the myth of the Pentecostal miracle of languages, the ability to speak in foreign "tongues".

It rustles and roars, it shimmers and sparkles. Bürck's music is many things: energetic, direct, elemental, but also complex, rich in references, exuberant, a sonic sci-fi project, a spectacular mind cinema. First of all, the pieces with live performers: Locust wind, rattle and hum (2002-13) consists of improvisations in which Stefan Ostersjo (10-string guitar) explores percussive and furiously fast-paced border areas. Bürck's electronic transformations develop surreal sounds from this: ghostly whirring, crackling storms. In In Zungen (2019), Marko Kassl (accordion) generates breathtaking contrasts in interaction with Bürck's live electronics. trembling tones to massive cluster cascades swirling through all registers.

Of the three acousmatic pieces, the eight-channel Capriccio con fuoco eriflessi (2006-19) uses edited recordings by the violinist Günter Marx, such as fast, spiccato-like figurations. The moment when a flaming, seething band of sound suddenly breaks off and a delicate spherical music of shadowy afterimages begins is impressive. In Lamento industriale (2017), Bürck, drawing on the practices of musique concrète, processes collected sound material from metal factories, breweries, quarries and scrap yards. Using specially developed programs, he creates a sound drama of subterranean hammering and hissing explosions - a distorted lament of digitally stretched scratching noises can also be heard: dark, oppressive. Alleluja (2000), which processes the Gregorian hymn and the sound of the bells of the Bad Urach Amandus Church, unfolds an equally immense, if rather joyful, wealth of associations. Roaring floods of noise intersperse with blurred choral fragments and blown-away bell sounds. Sounds deform and wander through an infinite reverberation space.

In short: no sterile laboratory electronics, instead exciting sound events, unexpected textures, combinations, metamorphoses, eruptions. Rainer Bürck has developed an idiosyncratic, expressive and highly imaginative language in electroacoustic music. A listening experience of a different kind.

Otto Paul Burkhardt

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