When Andrew met Morton

Morton Feldman gets a new face

It looks as though, with some new releases of his works and a general surge in media attention, Morton Feldman could possibly make a great come-back as one of the most important composers of the 20th century. This would be all the more remarkable, because his vision was not as obviously an influence on modern sound sculptures as that of Philipp Glass or Steve Reich, who have already been "honoured" with tribute albums by musicians of the electronic scene. A new album by Andrew Pekler is now putting Feldman in prime position again.

A string quartet from the 50s served as an inspiration for "Strings + Feedback", Peklers third CD and his first on Berlin-based label Staubgold. Born in Usbekistan, he spent his youth in the USA, before moving to Germany and arriving right on time for the take-off of the small-scaled "click and cuts"-hype. Probably the only genuinely new musical direction of the past few years (discounting drum n bass, that is), this had everything to do with the idea of music as fractals: Cut your music into tiny fragments of only a few seconds length and then reassemble them, creating something new using these pieces - and a part of the original compositions' feeling will make it to its reincarnation. Pekler used Jazz sources and even though his debut "From Station to Station" was anything but close to Miles Davis or even John Scofield, it was praised both by electronica-fanatics and open-minded Jazz-friends. It worked on two levels, as well: You could listen to it intensely and watch the changes in microtonal layers - or you could have a nice big glass of latte macchiato to go with it. This aspect of casualness is very important to Andrew, who claims that what attracted him to Feldman was the fact that his music didn't "demand anything specific from you" and characterised it as "perfect wall-paper". You could argue about that statement for ages, so let's don't. What counts is that Pekler has not gone the easy way and merely sampled the source material as a backing for his own music. Instead, he created "instable systems" of String Quartet excerpts and original pieces that were continously reprocessed and influenced each other. The result has drawn as much admiration as it has been called "unlistenable" and anti-music.

It sure puts Pekler into a position his label rightly calls "an intermediary between sound worlds". And it's been a long time that anyone has creatively approached this kind of material. Morton Feldman would have been happy, probably. He was much too busy with his dayjob and would have appreciated someone else doing the work for him.

Homepage: Andrew Pekler
Homepage: Staubgold
Source: TAZ