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Jan St. Werner, "Blaze Colour Burn"
Jan St. Werner's work under his own name—assertively distinct from his music as Lithops and in Mouse On Mars—is an airy return to ideas he toyed around with over a decade ago, now given a conceptual touch up. His deference to specific aliases for these different releases has a purpose; most of the material here is for film scores or concept pieces and stands out from all his past work. It's scarce, warm, and comforting ambient music with little to dislike and plenty to think about.
This album is the inaugural release from Thrill Jockey's "Fiepblatter" series of experimental musics, which use concept and location as a loose thematic umbrella. Blaze Color Burn is a perfect introduction, then, because the most substantial part of each piece is its conception and the meta-dialogue it attempts to create. Opener "Cloud Diachroma," designed as a companion to a film by visual artist Rosa Barba is a skirting, loose ambient composition that recalls Werner's work with Markus Popp as Microstoria. Most singularly apparent of Werner's ambient work is his inner logic with regards to rhythm, space, and time, and "Cloud Diachroma" sees him abstracting ideas of spatial awareness for a result that is disarming and beautiful.
Similarly with "Spiazzacorale B," culled from an eight hour live session that utilized its location as a primary instrument, the digital manipulation of sound holds major sway over the actual music. Melodies are stretched, a saxophone enters late, a conversation is overheard, drones swarm the channels, but the real notes being played are the silent clicks and shifts that Werner conducts from his laptop, engineering an odd conversation of competing harmonies and weird conflicts. I feel as if more than anything, I'm hearing the brushstrokes; "Serra Beacon's" odd interrupts and volume fluctuations strike me more than the notes playing and improves them in retrospect.
"Spiazzacorale A" tests the boundaries between live and prepared music by juxtaposing them abruptly and it comes out sounding like a polite argument captured in song. "Sipian Organ" is probably the harshest piece of the bunch, taking a divergent turn into staggered samples halfway through which frames the quieter, low frequency parts almost sarcastically. This is Werner taking voiceless, impersonal music and inserting a human quality to it, where the incidents of disharmony and arrhythmic jerks play out like the behavior of actors, with an unorthodox but intuitive sense of timing.
It has taken a long time for Jan St. Werner to have such a commanding hold on the music he wants to make. Blaze Color Burn is a collection of recordings that show his refined artistic vision in full swing, a pleasant environment of tone and timbre specialized by his unique brand of sonic personalization. Fans of Werner's poppier, beat driven electronica will find this a starker creation by far but I argue it is equal in complexity and in quality.
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