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CD Feature/ Günter Müller: "Reframed"

  Tobias

As a music journalist you’re always out to find hidden connections and secret links between artists, grouping individual lines together to create movements, schools and styles. So when Günter Müller releases an album with Jason Kahn’s cut label, there is a burning question right away: Why hasn’t this happened much earlier?

There are so many similarities between the approaches of these two artists, regardless of how different their biographies may read and how personal still their music may be, that one can not help but wonder why this hasn’t resulted in more direct interaction: Both currently live in Switzerland, both are trained percussionists and both use their instrument in a highly unusual way. If you want to establish a border, then maybe it has to be seen in the impression that Müller likes to keep the “drum aspect” slightly more intact than Kahn, with echoing pulsations fading in and out on almost all of the five parts of this suite. Which has everything to do with his unique composing set-up of a custom-built drum set with pick-ups and contact microphones, sometimes accompanied by taping devices such as an iPod or MiniDisc player. This points towards a subtle difference in accentuation: If Kahn wants to highlight the sound aspect of his percussions, Müller wants to emphasize the percussive nature inherent to the timbres of his drumset. And yet, this is clearly a drone-album, with atmospherics playing the most important part. Especially the stretched-out twentytwo minutes of “Reframed 2” are a deep soundscape bubbling to the surface from the friction between a more rapidly flowing frequential  fountain and inertly undulating bass stimuli. Müller is certainly no stranger to using sonorities as factors for deepness, but he just as much uses the inner rate of movement of his sounds as well as slowmotion effects to suggest spaceousness – such as in the third part, which creates a hypnotic effect by means of nothing more than single-note streaks of light over a droning texture.

Even though the select range of sounds suggests a “minimal” approach, Müller keeps his elements in a constant flow, which again hints at his background as a percussionist. And yet, if you didn’t know it, you would be hard-pressed to tell how “Reframed” was created. This element of suspense is something he again shares with Kahn – and which they have just brought to American stages this month on a tour with the Signal Quintet.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Günter Müller
Homepage: Cut Records