Danya Pilchen & Kali Ensemble: Paper Braids
(Moving Furniture)
DL
Ukrainian composer Danya Pilchen & Kali Ensemble investigate organ feedback on this uncompromising album full of avant-garde spacewards sound.
You put the record on and nothing happens – until a long, high tone suddenly makes itself manifest after a few minutes and gradually builds in timbre. Other single tones seem to join it, and a sort of baton race emerges between various tones.
After about five minutes these small, incremental processes merge into a shifting sinew of high processed sound that has a more tangible outline. Tones gently sway in and out of harmony and form new sonic alliances as various other component parts are added.
So begins Danya Pilchen & Kali Ensemble’s Paper Braids, the result of four years of collaborative work in The Netherlands. During this time, the young Ukrainian musician and the Hague-based music collective worked to a number of principles around the “act” of listening. The key one for those listening in here may be how we hear sound interacting with a performance space, and how that particular space can “control” how long an individual sound can last, or can manifest, during the lifetime of the music.
The recording was made at Amsterdam’s famous Orgelpark Hall with the acoustics of the Hall in mind, along with the tuning and timbral specificities of the four organs found in the piece. Each has a wonderful name – Utopa, Sauer, Verschueren and Van Straten – and tones to match. Speakers and microphones were placed at four different spots in the hall to milk the acoustic feedback that responded to the organs’ sound.
Danya Pilchen seems to have a specific interest in manipulating feedback in a physical space. I’ve seen his work in action, in a gallery space in Rotterdam, where approaching one of his installations triggered an electronic noise. With Paper Braids, the sound has – obviously – been repackaged as a recording, to be heard in various formats. (More braids in this metaphorical paper chain.) This means the act of listening is different, maybe more difficult in more passive situations where headphones, or the record needle, acts as the midwife.
And I will tell you now, it’s not an easy listen if you’re new to music like this. You may think, once you take the plunge, that I am essentially writing about a long, initially high pitched whine, processed organ notes, and passages of manipulated feedback that lasts nearly fifty (yes, 50) minutes. Those who expect a comparison will have to take my gambit that this music, with its extended tones and experimental or “antiformal” approach to composition, lies broadly in the tradition of La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and the minimalists, or maybe the Hague School and even Paul Panhuysen in the manner of, or the ideas around, its construction. For those curious to suck all this stuff and see, we can only echo Viv Savage at the back of the tour bus: there are whole new worlds out there.
Listen in closely and some really transcendent passages make themselves manifest. Around the twenty three minutes mark, the differences in the organ parts become clearer, with more resonant tones establishing themselves. Again, for those wishing a comparison, imagine a stripped-back Tim Hecker. We drop to ghostly mid-tone which ushers in a slightly atonal thrum that has something cosmic about it: part Protestant organ service, part Tardis taking off. Deeper, more resonant tones start to build and fan out, inhabiting a wider sonic space. At this point, things get very kosmische: Klaus Schultze’s Cyborg or Irrlicht could come to mind. From this heady point, things gradually dissolve into a long passage of deep, prenatal throbs of various weights. These eventually evaporate, and resolve around an ending that sounds like a huge old wind turbine starting up. The mellow ending comes as a shock. By the record’s end, you can feel quite out of puff.
This is an intense, sometimes spiritual listen and my best advice is to surrender to the sound in all its varying iterations. Give it a go.
~
More about Danya Pilchen can be found here. Danya Pilchen’s site is here. Kali Ensemble’s site is here.
All words by Richard Foster. More writing by Richard can be found at his author’s archive.
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