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Knowledge alone is flat and lifeless, but may become meaningful through the accumulation of experience over time. Bernd Kistenmacher will tell you that this path to knowing is long, and permits no shortcuts. His album Disintegration (62'46") offers eight electronic listening studies, informed by his decades long involvement in Spacemusic. Each piece exhibits a distinctive mood and atmosphere which keeps us well within a chilled space throughout this journey. Rhythms and slow beats do emerge in a few places, but the overall feel of Disintegration is that of contemplation. Beneath changeless constellations synthesizer strings build out and hold, as bass laden drones bulge with portent. Then later, like a spark in the open air, glittering modulations spray and dapple their sonic particles in echoing trails. The wheels are stilled, leaving room for the rushing of metal drones and slowed adagio synths. The ambiance softens, as the delicate lilt of an ascending voice reaches us from out of a diffuse celestial realm. Bernd Kistenmacher has learned how to reprogram his own mind. He forges together the vocabularies of technology and art, memory and music, literature and mathematics, electronics and emotion in his search for the perfect language - a cognitive language in which he can truly think. A language that is more expressive than anything we have before encountered. Waiting for a sign in the sky, or a word from the stars, Kistenmacher has taken the way of the thinker - and never loses sight of the cosmic wonders he is trying to capture, or of the nebulous mysteries his audience is trying to fathom. Disintegration can be as warm as the sun on the skin, or just as easily become like the dark light holding grinding galaxies. An exploration of sound mass, where the collective textures of instruments are treated as one single entity, his music breaks out with forlorn voltage.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 13 July 2017 |
