Ohlmeier /Khroustaliov /Fischerlehner
en/de
Lothar Ohlmeier - bass clarinet
Isambard Khroustaliov - modular synthesizer & computer
Rudi Fischerlehner - drums
"On
the opening track (...) carpets of sound by electronic artist
Khroustaliov hum out of the depth, dark and intense, surrounding
you and pressing into the pit of your stomach. While
Fischerlehner's drums keep triggering little avalanches, he
makes the cymbals sing so that they harmonize perfectly with the
electronics. Ohlmeier's bass clarinet brings pessimistic and
intense melodies to light."
[freiStil]
"... invoking a time when free jazz explored the new
possibilities of improvisation and emerging technology suggested
a wildly optimistic future... resuscitating the arcane launch
pad used by Sun Ra in his mid-60s 'Heliocentric World' phase ...
Sound truly unlike anything else."
[Kris Needs, Electronic Sound]
"A formidable interlocking of ideas, resulting in a type of
improvised post-jazz bestowed with a futuristic trim. In the
moments when all three musicians are playing together, the unity
of purpose is frightening, the boundaries between Britton’s
synths, Ohlmeier’s resonant clarinet and the especially intense
quiet cymbal work almost impossible to discern, not unlike a
colourblind person hopelessly trying to identify a specific
colour."
[Mat Smith, Further]
Album
“Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind ...”
The hypertide is real, so is Kiribati. In our collective
somnabulism we've managed to create a situation where a low lying
atoll in the Pacific will soon be flooded by the polar ice we've
managed to melt in part by uploading photos to Instagram. A real
life desert island paradise submereged by a virtual tide of
holiday selfies.
The effects of the hypertide are however neither limited in
dimensionality, nor assuaged by the imminent dissapearance of
Kiribati. The hypertide will rage onwards drowning both the real
and the virtual in what the philosopher and computer scientist
Jaron Lanier has described as 'a vast pointilist spew' of platform
sterilised media that has been robbed of any history or culture
through which it might once have had meaning.
This flood of meaninglessness that is perpetuated by the statistics of likes, shares and playcounts on social media, is perhaps most heavily courted by the world of music. Beseiged by the 'wisdom of the crowd' that promised to make sense of digital music's post-Napster / ‘all music is free on the internet' ubiquity, music culture's diversity is now being strangled by the interests of venture capital, leaving many of its most idiosyncratic practitioners unable to make a living from their work.
And yet the relationship between music and computation once had a very different prospect. Fuelled by the experiments and visions of the 20th century, from jazz's exploration of the creative possibilities of improvisation to the lyrical use of emerging electric instruments and recording devices in pop and dance music production and the formal and syntactic exploration of early computers by classically trained composers in search of new sonorities, their once existed a wild optimism surrounding the use of new technology in music.Hypertide Over Kiribati is our own personal search and invocation of a version of this optimism in the face of the anonymising, anodysing force of platform capitalism in music. An afront to a dull thud of nothingness that threatens to trivialise, divide and silence that legacy, the music recorded here attempts to seek out and explore alternate realities for man-machine symbiosis in music making, with the hope that it will inspire others to search and continue to search for new horizons.
Links
Isambard Khroustaliov on not-applicable.org
Lothar Ohlmeier on lotharohlmeier.com
Rudi Fischerlehner bio