The Periodic Sound Journal: experimental

23:57:00

Taavi Tulev - Rand / Beach

23:48:00

Gregory Büttner - Wenn Uns Jemand Hört

Artist: Gregory Büttner

Album: Wenn Uns Jemand Hört - Sag - Wir Haben Einfach Kurz Luft Geschnappt

Label: 1000Füssler

Genre: Experimental, Noise

On his own label 1000Füssler, Büttner has a new release with 2 slightly older pieces and the first one is the title piece, which he translates as 'if somebody hears us - tell them - we only had to catch a breath', and its music to a performance piece by Anja Winterhalter and it's from 2010. What the performance was about isn't mentioned, which is perhaps a pity as now it remains a piece of music, created with the use of cracks, hiss, pops. Büttner uses a laptop, but also field recordings, microphones, small speakers, objects and some treatment of all of that, again using the laptop. That's the kind of work we find here in this title piece and Büttner does a fine job, but not something out of the ordinary I think. It fits his own previous releases, perhaps a bit more refined, a bit more delicate, but at nineteen minutes also perhaps a bit on the long side for what it is. The other piece on this release is 'Falte', which is over thirty-three minutes, which uses sine waves, digital crackles and white noise, which Büttner plays back over different external loudspeakers, which were prepared with resonant objects like tin cans, tubes, wooden boxes 'to add some natural acoustics' and also "pure sine wave without any overtones reacted with the physical characteristics of a tin can or white noise be filtered by the resonance chamber of a plastic tube'. A work that belongs to the world of musique concrete, I'd say. It's not easy, if not impossible at all, to tell why I enjoyed this piece over the other one. Maybe it's because it uses sounds that I find more appealing? Maybe the whole form sound collage works better in this piece? The sine waves shift back and forth and keep changing the way the sound, sometimes close by, sometimes from afar and clearly cut into lots of smaller segments: just like a mighty musique concrete piece would dictate a composer. There is nothing in here that is on an endless sustained routine or noise for the sake of more noise. Sometimes it's loud for sure, but then sometimes, in fact most of the times, it's not, and it moves along between various degrees of audibility, thus remaining to keep the attention of the listener until the very end. This is, for me at least, Büttner at his very best. This piece, alone, on a CD, would have been also just enough, and the title piece could have been a 3"CDR for the die-hard fans only.

Written by Frans de Waard via Vital Weekly