INGAR ZACH - Before Nightfall One

Label boss Sofa makes sparing use of the imprint to release his own projects, and whenever it does happen, it's always a genuinely significant addition to the varied output of the esteemed Norwegian label. For years, Ingar Zach, together with various outfits (Mural, Dans les arbres, O3), has been working tirelessly to expand the vocabulary of contemporary percussion: this earned him an invitation from two members of the Australian ensemble Speak Percussion to collaborate on the first chapter of the live series titled "Before Nightfall" – subsequent instalments have featured fellow countrymen Tony Buck (The Necks), Robbie Avenaim and Carolyn Connors, as well as Americans Chris Corsano and Steven Schick (Bang On A Can). As a rule, each guest invited to Melbourne takes part in a single day of rehearsal sessions followed by the evening's public performance, so as to inspire an immediate rapport among the musicians involved.

Eugene Ughetti (Speak's artistic director) and Matthias Schack-Arnott join Zach to form the brand-new trio documented across this generous half hour of close dialogue at the extreme edge of atonality. Following in the footsteps of pioneer Lê Quan Ninh, the Scandinavian experimentalist once again proves he has absorbed not just the most original and unusual percussive techniques, capable of turning drums into sound surfaces in their own right, but above all the dramaturgical sensibility needed to steer a live performance which, together with the other two soloists, takes on the shape of a slow, weighty emergence from primordial darkness.

The inherent absence of dominant notes allows them to work around sound in its most tactile sense: so, once again, they embrace a language ecology that escapes the linear development of traditional composition, registering at most a rising climax in volume and in the urgency of their gestures.

Like the roar of a double bass with its strings barely taut, the deep tremor of a drum follows the first steps into the darkness, before a shrill trilling of cymbals and bells pervasively fills the acoustic space. Chimes and droning vibrations mark the transition to a more relaxed, contemplative phase, echoing Eastern rituals adapted to the cadence and sensibility of Cagean interpretations. Past the quarter-hour mark, concrete rhythmic elements return, rustles and disordered clangs that in their own way seem to form a rudimentary prototype of a sonic Morse code, while the subsequent screeches bring things conceptually closer to industrial modernity, gradually leading to the restless (non-)resolution of the enigma.

Deliberately outside of time and genre boundaries, the research of Ingar Zach and his Australian companions stakes a claim to an expressive domain where there is still much to experiment with and dare, even though very few acolytes are capable of interpreting its potential with such visionary flair and command of their own means.

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30/08/2018