covalent radii revisited

VITAL WEEKLY

Here we have more music from Sascha Stadlmeier, better known as EMERGE (see also elsewhere, a very busy bee as a musician and a label boss. His Attenuation Circuit has a massive catalogue of releases, and the latest addition is this music he created with Hans Castrup as part of an exhibition of their visual work. For Castrup, that means drawing, and for Stadlmeier, photography, which he always did a lot, but in more recent years, taking it to a more artistic level. They created the music using piano, electronics (Castrup), violin, and sound recycling (Stadlmeier). As with Castrup’s solo work, the title comes from the world of physics and means “The covalent radius, rcov, is a measure of the size of an atom that forms part of one covalent bond. It is usually measured either in picometres (pm) or angstroms (Å), with 1 Å = 100 pm”. Individual titles don’t have titles. I’d be curious to learn more about the artistic process; for instance, do they pick up each other’s sounds in the respective sound processing, or do they restrict themselves to their own instruments? The music provides no clues. I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about Castrup’s solo music, finding it too much of a mix of various interests and styles, played through improvisational, without head or tail. That’s different on this CD. Maybe it’s because he plays with somebody, maybe there has been some talk beforehand. The electronic side of the music plays a more significant role here, forming drones and patterns in which the piano desolates and moves around. There is a plink here and there and some bass chords, adding some delicate atmospheric melodic touches to the music. When plucked, the violin does the same; if EMERGE uses a bow, it’s all part of the drones. The improvisational element remains present, especially in the second and fifth pieces, but with all the electronics used, it’s part of the overall atmospherics. The third piece I enjoyed the most, because there was a lot of tension, which went missing in the fifth piece, which came across as a bundle of sounds rather than a composition. At 31 minutes not a very long CD, but quite nice overall.

https://www.vitalweekly.net/number-1453/