INGAR ZACH - floating layer cake

Once resurfaced from the sonic rooms wrapped in the most ancestral night, avant-garde percussionist Ingar Zach is certainly capable of engaging with the present too. All the more so when his dark, primitivist poetics is applied to a mixed ensemble like the one he encountered last year on "Pressing Clouds Passing Crowds" (Hubro, 2018) by fellow traveler Kim Myhr, already alongside him in the trio Mural.

The chamber suite written and conducted by the guitarist inspired Zach to create a new version of his piece "The Lost Ones", originally composed for voice and percussion alone; the participation of the Quatuor Bozzini nonetheless remains functional to sustaining a largely monochrome, rarefied atmosphere, with only a few jabs disturbing the linearity traced by a short wave running through the full twenty minutes, up to a climax that, without tragedy, carries the unmistakable scent of an ineluctable ending.

The poetic contribution of French-Norwegian artist Caroline Bergvall is as brief as it is difficult to interpret, like a story of which only the final paragraph survives, leaving us unable to know who, what or why, only the vague and inexplicable how of a farewell with no return.

[…]

Now I must leave, now you must let go. Now you leave, now I let you go.

Take good care of this life, said the departing one, to the ones who stay.

I bless and thank you, embrace and hold you, said the left ones, to the leaving ones.

Said the last ones, to the lost ones.

[…]

"Let The Snare Speak", the second half of the album, is instead a solo reworking of the piece commissioned from Zach by the Australian ensemble Speak Percussion, responsible for the ongoing project "Before Nightfall", whose first chapter also featured our artist. The diffusion of sine tones through the amplifiers is not just a self-contained sonic element – born of Alvin Lucier's psychoacoustic research – but also serves to generate vibrations on the surface of the three snare drums controlled by Zach's hands. The result is a drone music that juxtaposes levels of continuity with others in perpetual mutation, amid granular effects of varying density that at times approach the less brutal electronic noise of Kevin Drumm.

In terms of showing the contrast between two sides of the Norwegian percussionist's artistic research, "floating layer cake" seems to have been driven more by the need to find a home for two medium-length pieces that would otherwise have thrown off the balance of earlier or future albums. The very origin of the two tracks ends up relegating them to the role of corollaries, interesting as they are, within the output of the Sofa label founder, who nevertheless finds the right occasion to display a versatility not so evident until now.

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09/04/2019