(08.22.05) The first time I heard Perspectives, I didn’t hear it. If you have, say, a noisy hard drive or trains rattling the neighbor’s windows, you probably won’t really hear Perspectives either. Both Günter Müller and Steinbrüchel are practitioners of the microsound, the lowercase genre that whispers at the edges of perception and darts away swiftly when you try to actually focus on it. Perspectives is, frankly, a headphone record and deserves a pair of noise-canceling cans to properly appreciate the micro noises that these two have put together. Perspectives documents a series of concerts the two put on together in a number of European venues. The resulting tapes were then reworked by the artists down to this single CD (each being responsible for the mix of a track or two from a specific show), and this record flows as a single adventure, a single excursion into the miniature spaces of micro-music.
Sounds you may hear: a rotary telephone being dialed, crickets laughing down by a dried up creek bed, a hum of machinery at a power transfer station about six miles up the roadway, the patter of small feet as if elves were running along long underground hallways, foghorns of massive ships as heard through fog so thick it might as well be cotton, static that rattles like wind in the leaves and like pebbles raining down on plastic rooftops, the whisper of bell trees that have been turned into wind chimes and left outside on the most sweltering still night of summer (and yes, there is still a wind in such a night, you can hear it breathing against the bells), the crackle of distant meteors flashing and burning in the atmosphere and the appreciative huzzah! of the watching night insects, the drip of water into old steel bedpans, the harmonic drift of streetlights and power transformers, and the gurgle of ancient machinery that moves black water underground and away from the sight of the suburban dwellers. Of course, it is very possible that Günter Müller and Steinbrüchel have invented everything you hear. They’re that sort of improvisationists.
The marvelous thing about Perspectives (when you actually sit yourself down and listen to it) is how much activity is really going on within these tracks. Small noises dart and squirt like single cell organisms in a rich soup of drones while the percussive chatter of heavy atoms continually frays and burrs the aural landscape. Perspectives hides from you, but it is there. Really. Just shut out everything else and open your ears for it.
Perspectives is out now on List.
