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Helmut Schäfer, "Thought Provoking III"
A posthumous release from this composer, with help from Will Guthrie (percussion) and Elisabeth Gmeiner (violin), there is a significant use of space and ambience from this otherwise noise-centric artist. With its unconventional instrumentation and coda/remix by Schäfer’s collaborator and friend Zbigniew Karkowski, it is a fitting tribute.
The main piece, "Thought Provoking III," is built from two rehearsal performances and the final, public performance, with all three seamlessly woven together to sound like a single uninterrupted work.Opening with subtle processing and scraped violin, it becomes more and more abrasive, as if the strings were being slowly scraped across broken glass and dull knives.Behind this there’s deep, resonating percussion that rumbles malignantly in the distance.
Amid these acidic scrapes and room-shaking pulses, organ pipes (played with hair dryers) resonate like foghorns, aggressively and dominantly atop everything else.With these three major elements, Schäfer weaves together a uniform composition, using subtle processing and effects to transform the various noises.
In the latter half of the piece, the violin is stretched to inhuman guttural screams, the percussion becomes a cacophony of jarring, erratic thuds and bangs to create an overwhelming, uncomfortable chaos that eventually relents, leaving tiny fragments of noise and bellowing pipes off in the distance.
The shorter second piece, a remix of the first by Zbigniew Karkowski, embraces the harsher, rawer elements and turns them up to 11.The percussion is melded into thin, brittle sounds that resemble an overamplifed sheet of tin foil in a tornado.Sounds are sped up, creating a tense, hyperactive feeling that overshadows the discomfort from the former piece, before finally ending everything on a pure white-noise blast.Easy listening it is not, but is a compelling abstraction of Schäfer’s work.
While Guthrie mentions in the liner notes that no one "did" much during these performances, but that the sound was allowed to flow naturally, I think that gives the wrong impression.Even if the results are more a matter of nature taking its course, the composition and structure established by Schäfer in preparation for this work is what causes the magic to happen.
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