Sounds puncture space, and things float to the surface. It’s just another ordinary day for being human and listening to music when the smallest detail might make the biggest waves.
A poetic dance of painstaking deliberation
The small is in the great, and the great in the small on this album of ordinary experimental ambient music. Each time I listen I get drawn in by Ümlaut’s exceptional attention to detail. The songs are all filled with tiny sounds placed into longer drifts of texture. The long drones and sustained parts hold all of these small sounds together in a poetic dance of painstaking deliberation. You can hear just how attentive to detail Ümlaut (aka Jeff Düngfelder) is, and it makes me—as a listener—want to pay attention to those details.
This is digital acupuncture. One small pinprick in a certain node can change the course of the entire album’s energy structure. Or it is like casting the I Ching. Constant line changes transform one hexagram into another. Like life, these pieces are in continual shifting states from one to another. Yet they are all inside a container that holds these changes together and keeps them in a semblance of cohesive form. Just like the ordinary human being of the title, these pieces all shift around in place and time, but there are elements that make it distinct. Songs like “Everything is Appearing on Its Own” showcase this method where each sound is left to display itself before segueing into the next sound. Yet they are connected, joined together, so another way of hearing it is as a continuum with no separation.
Boundaries are fuzzy ::
Listening, I think of the term used by ancient architects when they were creating their beautiful buildings: discontinuous proportion. That is, a geometrical proportion where every quantity that is getting compared is different. Architects used it make sure these different proportions that none-the-less had a symmetry. The part is made to fit the whole.
This work does have a symmetric whole, even if a lot of it seems random. Yet those random bits were selected, making them less random. And by showcasing the random, Ümlaut puts them into connection with the particular. One small sound can change the entire shape of the galaxy, or at least the shape of this album. And listening to it, I am changed, I am different than I was. How different. I don’t know. Ask me in a few years, when I might not remember the detail that changed things so much was a sound on this album.
Clicks of glitch merge into a shadow space where echoes are applied to dial tone field recordings left alone in a minimalist room. Modified and recommodified consumer electronics spazz out briefly with light noise, covering everything in a halo of slightly erratic electrical discharge from gear that might also be partially defective. But these defects are like wabi sabi cracks in the pottery of the songs, showcasing fragile beauty.
I love a good puzzle and another interesting bit about this album is how each track name showcases an aesthetic choice Ümlaut put to work. The title track comes last and features soft pads and gentle pitch bending, easy to zone out to in a hammock as calm breeze blows by, the faint whiff of incense coming from nearby.
Meanwhile “Poème” features a recurring bell and layers of crackling static. This reminds me of early electronic tone poems, indeed, Edgard Vareses’ Poème électronique. Piano memories reach to the surface on other tracks, while damage control is attempted on others. Sounds puncture space, and things float to the surface. It’s just another ordinary day for being human and listening to music when the smallest detail might make the biggest waves.
Ümlaut is Jeff Düngfelder, a U.S. experimental composer/sound artist now based in the northern Connecticut countryside. The thematic concepts distinguishing his work are absence and silence; the ineffable exchange between viewer and image; random moments of stillness within a landscape in flux.
Un Être Humain Ordinaire is available on Audiobulb. [Bandcamp]
