Christian Wolfarth percussion

Christian Wolfarth - percussion
 

"From Christian Wolfarth I already reviewed a whole bunch of releases, including four 7" releases, all-dealing with "acoustic solo percussion" (see Vital Weekly 687, 706, 744 and 772, or the double CD with remixes in Vital Weekly 879). Very few of those pieces sounded anything he's playing drums, and while I like solo percussion music of improvisers, I tought these 7" were really good; almost like electro-acoustic works, so with each new release I am eager to hear what his next move will be. On this LP there are two sidelong pieces, 'Spuren I' and 'Spuren II'. 'Spuren' means 'tracks' and if I understand correctly the early jazz drummer Baby Dodds inspired him. That doesn't mean this is a jazz record, far from it. In 'Spuren I' Wolfarth starts with some excellent ringing overtones of a bow on a cymbal, big or small, and it moves quite gently trough space. It is humming lowly and rattles quietly until it hits a bump and just the rattle remains; it sounds like hiss, but no doubt it's a small chain or two upon a cymbal. This is really a great piece of music.
'Spuren II' on the other side starts out with a more percussive sound; the multi-layered rumble of objects, but knowing Wolfarth it is all 'live' and not a matter of extensive layering of sounds. This piece is more open within the way Wolfarth plays it, with a lingering menace of a drone pinned underneath. But within this piece he moves trough some more sections/ideas and there is more rumble and rattle going on, but here too Wolfarth sometimes moves into the very abstract field, up to the point where one doesn't recognize anything even remotely resemble percussion. It's hard (and of course unnecessary) to choice between sides here, but the minimalist approach of 'Spuren I' appealed to me more than the somewhat loose organisation of 'Spuren II'. The former has a great ambient tonality, which at the right volume moves gentle trough one's space. Pressed on marbled vinyl, this is a great work of art."

Frans de Waard (Vital Weekly 1038, June 2016)

"Spuren (hiddenbell records 009) is a very good solo percussion record from  Christian Wolfarth, released in Zurich on his own h iddenbell records. This player has appeared in not a few collaborative settings, for both modernist composition and free improvisation, and given what we hear on Spuren it’s not surprising to me that he’s worked with Jason Kahn. We’ve also heard Wolfarth in these pages in slightly more conventional jazzy settings, such as on The Holistic Worlds of Wintsch Weber Wolfarth and Thieves Left That Behind.

Wolfarth’s achievement here is mainly to do with the sound he makes, the timbres and the textures, all of which are arranged and performed so as to maximise contrasts – various grains and weaves of drum sound rubbing up against each other like so many fabric swatches in a choice tailor’s workshop. He’s not after mad disjunctures of sound, and the total effect is wholesome and integrated, creating a very satisfying continual ever-changing rumble across two sides. The accretion of sounds is intended, I believe, to have a certain effect to do with creating an illusion of depth, a sense of perspective. It’s not the same thing as recording engineers strive to create when they speak of “spatialising” the mix; here, its more like a very sophisticated kind of magic-eye painting, applying principles from abstract art.

Another way to look at this cross-patching effect is to read the sleeve notes by Adam Sonderberg, short five-line paras of concise text (much like an abstract poem) which might describe the either process of creation or the finished work itself, and allude to the works of Stan Brakhage, the underground film-maker to whom so many musicians are in thrall. If you think of Brakhage’s work as continual overlays of contrasting textures, the connection with this drumming record seems plausible. “Flecks become shards become blocks” is one striking phrase that describes this accumulation of detail; “The surface is variegated and open to the incidental” is another. Wolfarth has two specific Brakhage films in mind, one of them the famed Mothlight where Stan glued wings of moths directly onto celluloid in his pursuit of shining light through layers of semi-opacity.

At one level, this may sound like a recipe for formal process art with no discernible listening pleasure, but Wolfarth is a consummate craftsman, restricting himself to a deliberately limited range of possible sounds and performing them with rigid concentration. Through these means, he achieves sublimation very effectively, and after five minutes in I was utterly mesmerised by the stark intensity of this work, its gentle but insistent core of meaning."

Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector, May 2016)

"Christian Wolfarth's work clearly thrives on tactility and manipulation. In he also applied some techniques to concoct and subsequently remodel the acoustic substance on offer. On the one hand, his instrumental expertness is in evidence: one the other, processes of cut-and-paste and natural-sounding looping furnish several sections with potent connotations: relievingly hyptnotic a moment, almost suffocating the next. In fact, there are dynamic surpises waiting for the listener. In the first side, the layering of twinkling tolling strata is broken by discrete interferences and sudden spurts where the mix's volume is abruptly increased, thus generating sequences of small conflicts and bigger clashes. These incidents are typically short-lived, ruptures utilized for the time necessary to radically after the initial setting. At one point, all we're left with is a chain of shards of white noise-like frequencies: elswhere we perceive a liquefaction of sorts of the entire textural mass. The second half is largely typified by irregularly clattering sonorities, principally of skin and metal descent. The timbral variations are seen as parts of an ebullient totality, energies channelled into spurious fluxes where predictability is not a given. Magnetizing reflections and rumpled concreteness interact in a mulitude of ways: improvisational wildness is nevertheless out of the equation. Rather, we observe the progressive accumulation of percussive deposits embedded in a deceivingly welcoming framework. A few dangers are presumably lingering around the corner; sinister cracks can be seen on the walls.
An absorbing record, as expected by an artist gifted with discriminating resourcefulness as Wolfarth has always shown himself to be."

Massimo Ricci (touching extremes, May 2016)