These memory-recordings expose the complex relationship between music and silence. They say that the ambient umbrella constantly expands the notions of what music might be. The Black Square could be wordless new ear poetry for the constant listener. I think that The Black Square might be a series of sound situations that flow and change as they go.
In the atmosphere of strange formal coherence
The thematic concepts distinguishing this work are absence and silence; the ineffable exchange between viewer and image; random moments of stillness within a landscape in flux. Using a minimalistic, electro-acoustic approach, this elusive patchwork of field recordings and electronics merge the world of shadows and colors. These memory-recordings expose the complex relationship between music and silence. They say that the ambient umbrella constantly expands the notions of what music might be. The Black Square could be wordless new ear poetry for the constant listener. I think that The Black Square might be a series of sound situations that flow and change as they go. The sharp piercing ringing metal sounds are brief and intense, the sound always changes. Safe to say, there are lots of things happening here, from the opening, a fantasy world of shattering chimes and an electronic rumbling plus the piano.
When I listen to The Black Square events, I think that these sounds include musical elements but something is different. I don’t know. Maybe this is a soundtrack to a theatrical experience, all expressed with just sound and with no words except the song titles. This could be some kind of science fiction. This could be gothic horror. The Black Square could be the new chamber music of the days ahead. We can probably call it electronic music and just move on to trying to describe how it feels to listen to it, based on personal opinions and feelings or conversational facts.
Jeff Düngfelder aka Ümlaut is an interdisciplinary artist now based in the northern Connecticut countryside, wrangling sound, film, photography and graphic design to create his audio-visual projects. He mentions a connection with Kazimir Malevich’s revolutionary painting titled “Black Square,” where the artist, “trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world…took refuge in the form of the square.” In addition to his solo recordings as Ümlaut, Jeff Düngfelder mixes his own electronica with downtempo and jazz elements as a member of Intelligent Life, the trio that equally features Mike Brown on contrabass, and Joshua Trinidad on trumpet.
To me, the sound is constantly transforming and sometimes repeating. I think about how all these stories came along in a dream, a repeating sequence of events going from one scene pausing and then another scene taking over. Sometimes things get solid, eventually things melt away, allowing change to come again. These dreams with odd things happening are not distressing in any way, the atmosphere is mostly calm.
Looking upwards, “nearly cloudless” (5:06) opens with some high pitched oddsounds while in relaxed endless fields we wander. We are opening up that fantasy world mentioned earlier, with the various chimes and a rumbling piano, broken by some intense and unusually high pitched metal ringing. There are quiet stretches and moments when things are happening all around. And then there is the chopper, some kind of a flying machine that passes nearby, with low and loud pounding, barely suggested in this mixture of afternoon and midnight. There is no danger.
Now for the second track, “evidence to the contrary” (5:24). Here the sonic brew contains the cosmos and the transient elements, all in the atmosphere of strange formal coherence. I feel my senses relaxing, with sequences of odd sounds that form into familiar moments, a piano floating in the cosmos. The action is less sparse now than it has been, we go into a lot of electronic places, and the piano completes the moment. Bringing a constantly changing series of new audio pictures, “disparate images” (6:02), where there is a dark floaty piano, where some big echoey slow low notes emerge as we go drifting. I think I see a series of vignettes in a cycle, recognizing bits that were present earlier, with that high pitched tone that starts hot and then brings forth a bit of the dawn, a piano memory, an episode with melodic elements, a new alien saucer has arrived. Something happened, I don’t know.
A constantly changing series of new audio pictures ::
Reawaken to friendly spring peepers, “a kind of memento” (5:10) with a hint of a simulated samba clicking, rising out of those big slow echoing piano notes. The flow is smooth, no bumps. I hear a more complicated time beat that comes and goes and a new world starts here again. Again, those peepers lost in the piano have come back, using glitchy harsh field recordings with some crickets later too, and fading out into that old piano with the presence of so many memories. The passing subsequent episodes bring change and repetition, and so forth until it ends with no tears for the crickets of the night.
I remember the rough sound of a phonograph needle traveling across the wind-out at the end of a vinyl disc. Merge some long slow sustained drones and gradually changing electronic elements, “stories of empty light” (5:42). I think I hear an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment, blended so you don’t find the beginnings and ends, new episodes with new rhythms and repeating microbeats inducing gentle madness. Another scenario takes form and then melts, new textures coming and merging or fading away. Wordless, the story bubbles along, changes come and go, until we hear again the sound of the vinyl wind-off at the end of the track. Now I have given it away, not really, none of this is possible.
I might hear electronic brass with bass tones and sparse lingering piano of course, “the difference was” (5:18) the walls are strange on purpose. Maybe we are exploring an off-hours fun house when nobody is around and it is dark. Things are more busy on this track, more parts fit tightly together, allowing wobbling wanderers to make hornlike sounds and call forth more darkness. All of the sudden another room opens and things are different, soon gone.
Enjoy the flowing fog of atmospheric mystery and engaging, skillfully muffled curiosities. Something is saying something without words, here is a new dungeon, and a piano in the darkness. Horns and shadows, at the end of the track we are eaten by big quiet electronic night bugs. Like me, you try to assemble the clues and see the big picture, “platitudes notwithstanding” (5:52). Behold, another saucer with an alien traveler operating some kind of electronic gadget has landed over by the piano. Atmospheres come and go, by the end of the track the whole thing comes together as another well formed mystery.
Some kind of curious electronic tingling ::
Now the sun is out and the fields are green, I hear crickets and some kind of curious electronic tingling. This is an “ordinary instance” (5:18) with new rings and tings and electronics, encased within haunting drones. I think it is getting louder for a moment then falling back. Now I hear water and forest birds. The track continues into other bowers and other situations, rising up into the skylight with a few more of those playful distinct metallic tings. I still hear the ringing creatures, now it is getting strange out here. Hissing pops and repeating glitches as the needle again goes back into the wind-off.
Here comes the choir, the sound of the whirling knives come and go, now the choir is gone too and only the mystery remains. Time continues, the rain sweeps in, the wind picks up, building up and whirling away, sometimes I find more silver bubbles under the moon. Imagine explaining the way the light is changing at dawn, these are “marked circumstances” (5:40).
The concluding track begins with a piano and clouds, or forms that seem like clouds, “between two phrases” (5:24), opening into a new hall of mirrors with smoke created by electronics and deeply reverberating slow pianos. I hear throbbing beams with repeating elements that come and go, layered between suspenseful drone layers. Sometimes I think I hear something played backwards, that always sounds cool. I coast upon a loopy trance-inducing semi-melodic crystal with deep hollow space bumps. In a dream everything changes or ends, never providing any explanation, nor is one necessarily required.
Music composed & constructed by Jeff Düngfelder
Mixed & Mastered at the Hopmeadow Studio, Weatogue, Connecticut
The Black Square is available on Bandcamp.
