MURAL - Tempo

For several years now, my sedentary culture has allowed for just one hypothetical exception: I still harbour the dream of visiting the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, a place of “secular worship” where anyone, on any day of the year, can enter and find spiritual solace. Fourteen large canvases in shades of black by the Russian-American artist enclose an otherwise bare room – save for a few welcome benches – lit from above and conducive to contemplating these imposing monochrome thresholds, silent and inexhaustible sources of ancestral sensation. Entering this singular temple of true peace must be an authentically liminal experience, with a strongly Kubrickian flavour, overwhelming and uncodifiable (so much so that, to describe it in words, it unfortunately helps not to have experienced it).

It's said that more than one visitor, standing before Mark Rothko's enormous colour textures, could do nothing but drop to their knees and weep – whether from emotion or something else, there's no way to know. In a similar way, another artist might find the impulse to offer an equally humble response, perhaps just as vague but no less sincere and spontaneous: it was the great Morton Feldman, a friend of the painter, who first put his name to the eponymous composition in 1971; and the very lineup of Mural, split between two Norwegian members and one Australian, already recalls that of another of Feldman's monumental tributes, this time to the painter Philip Guston.

The trio has visited and “performed” at the Chapel more than once, making it resonate with live interventions particularly suited to the setting, one of which was already produced in 2011 by the institution itself.

The triple album, recorded in 2013 and now released by Sofa, presents three of the overall four hours of the performance, which thus takes shape as a direct confrontation between the primarily temporal nature of music and the immediacy of the painted surface, which belongs instead to the spatial dimension.

One must resolutely prepare – as far as our everyday surroundings allow – for the extremely hushed atmosphere of this event, because although the division into three CDs roughly traces its division into macro-phases, the chronological expansion and the recurring elements mean that “Tempo” retains its own wholeness, like the partial extract of a sonic life form that, amid physiological swells and silences, has, ideally, neither beginning nor end.

The recording opens with Kim Myhr's bowed guitar, which in its vibrant droning progress simulates an Indian rāga, and with the hissing underwater movements of Jim Denley's saxophone, in the style of Masahiko Okura. Ingar Zach's percussion then makes its solitary entrance: the heartbeat of the felt-struck bass drum, followed by some tonal brass that leads into a new section, where sudden guillotine-like jabs create a palpable tension, softened only by the placid arpeggios of the zither; the latter then forms an almost noise-like layer, closing the second hour amid involutions of trilling winds.

The second CD opens in a manner similar to the first, but in a climate that is, if anything, even more rarefied: a quiet sax solo, using techniques bordering on silence or microtonality, which by the tenth minute even abandon contact with the instrument altogether, leaving mere breaths floating in the air; the ever-identical patterns of the dissonant strings resemble an unwavering exercise in sonic stasis à la Taku Sugimoto. Past the quarter-hour mark, the pace picks up again but not the volume, so the ritual continues like a manoeuvre in the dark, its entrance reserved for the chosen few. Ten minutes later comes an almost absolute void: a breath of wind, the rustle of leather surfaces barely grazed, an almost imperceptible acoustic reflection, until the saxophone's circular close announces the coming interruption.

The fourth and final hour preserves the sacredness of silence for a few minutes as a prelude to the last, long and peaceful trance, by now a direct consequence of the loss of any sense of time, all the more so in the absence of scores or instructions of any kind. The three musicians once again cross paths, more united than ever in tracing naturalistic soundscapes (20.00) or deliberately non-descriptive ones. In “Coda” an extreme surge of expressive urgency manifests itself through a controlled entropy, which soon fades again into Myhr's closing arpeggios.

Time, then, is both the subject and the key to reading this singular, fascinating performance: all that we, who can listen back to it today, lack is the privilege of witnessing the magical dialogue of these sounds – a step away from non-music – with the monumental silence of the Rothkos, whose essence no audiovisual recording can truly capture.

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31/08/2015