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CD Feature/ Silvia Fässler & Billy Roisz: "Skylla"

  Tobias

Standard dictionaries on experimental music will provide you with definitions like: If it’s loud and distorted, then you can call it Noise. So what, then, is “Skylla”? Its title references greek mythology, its methology hints at improvisation, its aesthetics are minimal and its sounds built from granular waves and sonic microparticles – many will find this plentitude confusing.

The approach of Silvia Fässler and Billy Roisz on their collaborational debut album is well aware of its implications, of course. Obviously, these two experienced players from the Vienese underground have not decided upon their source material on the grounds of “trueness” or street credibility. Rather, their interplay is guided by a kind of concentrated seriousness which has nothing in common with the occasionally puberal gestures of the genre. 

Seriousness in this context means: Not straying from the chosen path, sticking to your initial vision and ignoring egoistic aspirations. These ten tracks (plus a  25-second-short opening piece) are consistently made up of surgically clean cuts, white noise drones, parasitic frequencies pitched to the level of tones and raw noise stretched into fluctuating rhythms. Sometimes, birdsong-like melodies will pop up to play twelve-tone scales in random order or a groove will appear from the depths (most noticeably on the slowly simmering “Rusty Spoon”). But most of the time, all elements are engaged in a pristine dance of abstractions, continually engaging and disengaing, as the music cuts through the fabric of banality.

There is nothing organic about this exchange at all, neither in the production or the timbres at the disposal of the duo, nor in their process of communication. “Skylla” remains a cool beast on the outside, screaming minutely chosen syllabels at its crowd, never exploding with rage or drooping its head in despair. Fässler and Roisz have dusted all human fingerprints off their samples and restricted the action radius of their music to a mechanical breath: Exactness is favoured over explicit emotions, rational choices are deemed more important than the thrill of outbursts of intuition.

This technique, on the other hand, allows them to take off to a level of their own. Unbound by traditional means of expression, Fässler and Roisz can let their arrangements develop in any which way they want, change course within the wink of an eye and steer their sounds into subtle and surprising collisions. Most of all, it lends a transparency to their actions which directs attention away from the trivial image of two musicians playing in the same room together and towards nothing but music itself.

By turning towards “Noise”, the performers are able to present their ideas in the purest possible form without any external distractions. Played at higher volumes, “Skylla” of course gains a more physical and aggressive tone, which places it side by side with more traditional exponents. But overalll, this album sets the record straight in terms of easy classification: There are worlds of nuances hiding behind the standard dictionary definition in this case.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Editions Mego Records