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This is Staubgold's second architecturally-oriented release, the first being To Rococo Rot's Kolner Brett, a disc which set about creating a kind of audio simulation of Cologne's Kolner Brett building, situating tracks within a quasi-geometric framework and streamlining the group's austere sound into a series of registers meant to represent different parts of the biulding. Soundchambers is different, more of a commemoration or a traditional response piece than To Rococo's stylized production.
The three seasoned Viennese and German musicians teamed up at the opening of the Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal for a ceremonial live improvisation, Suchy with processed guitar and laptop, Hautzinger with his trumpet, and Ehlers manipulating piano samples and machine noise via computer. The result feels markedly less site specific than Kolner Brett, with a spaciousness that could be associated with Serralves' sprawling gardens, but feels almost at odds with the building's "chambered" construction.
I've listened to the disc in a number of different spaces trying to gauge the closest approximation, and so far it feels most appropriate in transit, speeding over trainyards on the subway or strolling a city block flanked by walls of glass. Hautzinger's trumpet, with its characteristic breathy flights and hesitant abbreviations, would seem the perfect companion to the microsound noodling of the two computer musicians, yet he delivers a refreshingly lyrical, linear performance for most of Soundchambers. His lush and expansive lines drift through and bisect Ehlers' and Suchy's abstractions like a street musician's horn through the city's mess, warping the mood to make every crushing noise a miniature buttress for the fragile howl of one man's breath.
The computerists do not work against their protagonist, rather covering his lesser moments with warm piano tinker or swirls of guitar that keep the mood buoyant and coolly triumphant. The musicians practice a treacherous kind of hesitant, near-impressionistic playing, drifting across subtle movements and phrases with the threat of dissolution ever-present, especially given the amount of swift processing required to transform so much brushed guitar or industrial noise (Ehlers sourced sound in the heating rooms of Stuttgart) into such coherent, immediate swells. The severe geometry of Serralves, as indicated in the sleeve's graphic component, feels far enough removed from Soundchambers' tenuous construction for me to question whether experiencing the building would be at all emotionally consistent with the music. Luckily, a finer appreciation of the architecture's genesis or deeper implications is not required to fully engage with this beautiful recording.
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- Whitelodge - Masters Within Spaces (excerpt)
- Nurse With Wound - A Wasted Life of Phagocyte Foot Fetishism
- irr.app.(ext.) - Perekluchenie: The Stairway to the Blue Light Subsides (excerpt)
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When Piano Magic starts singing about libraries, things are right in the universe once again. By a similar axiom, a good Piano Magic album is marked by its invocation of libraries in one or more songs. Thus, the "The Tollbooth Martrys," the seventh song on The Troubled Sleep Of Piano Magic, is evidence that Magic has produced another splendidly ethereal album. This wasn't the case with the previous album, Writers Without Homes, which was noticeably devoid of libraries.Green UFOs
There are very certain elements which work for Piano Magic: sounds of desolation; wind-swept soundscapes; eye-blisteringly good artwork; female vocals of approximate age eight which expound on libraries; eccentric post-studio sounds, some of which sound like electronic birds, others of which sound like electronic mauls and hacksaws. What happened during the thankfully brief and innocuous flirtation with the 4AD label (the band has moved on to the Spanish label Green UFOs) was that the band eschewed and disregarded these elements. The cover art (once a beauty equaling and sometimes surpassing the music itself) became the generic "new" 4AD look, which plagues all their recent releases; the music became far more baroque and populated by more and more instruments; it was filled out (in other words, less desolation and isolation) to the point where it approached post-rock jam band; the vocals became burdensome instead of bolstering. But now, Piano Magic have found a way to reconcile some of the old elements with the new. "Saint Marie" starts off this new album humbly enough: a tremulous guitar line syncopated by frontman Glen Johnson's hushed vocals. Soon, though, a pulsing stereo of guitars rises and falls alternately, which itself is then punctuated by fast programmed beats of a drum machine. It's an engrossing and compelling sound that persists for the better part of four and a half minutes. It doesn't change much, but it doesn't need to. And this is precisely what used to make Piano Magic magic: the ability to make the sustained repetition of a created sound utterly compelling. Indeed, there are some moments which feel like sloppy seconds from the 4AD affair, but they are mediated by stronger songwriting and a moodier atmosphere. "Speed the Road, Rush the Lights," the weakest song on the album, could be a vestige of Writers Without Homes, and yet I can sense the band turning away from a song like this throughout the rest of the album, which thereby makes this song more palatable. Another illustrative track is "The Teacher's Son," which contrasts the old and new sound of Piano Magic perfectly. For the first minute of the song, there is a spare and lovely guitar line with Johnson's vocals amidst it. An old Piano Magic song could have maintained this sound for five minutes without tiring or growing tedious. But at about 1:15 into the song, the other instruments (bass and percussion, not of the electronic sort) crash in. During the brief 4AD period, the song would have been irreparably marred by these instruments. Yet the ensemble makes it work in this case, and I suspect it has to do with the stronger song-writing. Curiously, Piano Magic has retrieved most of its gothic gloom and beauty ever since its divorce from 4AD, though one might have thought it would have surely increased threefold in that marriage. In any case, it's good to see the band has rediscovered its eloquence for libraries and the sound of desolation, and I can only hope the next album will reintroduce the electronic birds I once adored so much. 
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- Pakoisvoima (transl: Fugalforce) - from CD 1
- Ilma (transl: Air) - from CD 4
- Säteily (transl: Radiation) - from CD 4
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