Two years after the magnificent The Sky Torn Apart on Glacial Movements, Paul Schütze returns to stimulate our perceptual necessities with music for an installation that also includes visual and olfactory elements, the overall intent carefully explained in the piece’s introductory notes. For those who didn’t have a chance for the on-site experience, the recording remains to elicit reactions and sensations. The sounds created by this man have always furnished open-minded listeners with small particles of acoustic wisdom.
True, to simply call “music” a composition by the multi-talented Australian is reductive to say the least. To quote Schütze himself, the temperament here is “texturally unresolving and fluid”. Sudden appearances, mysterious signals, shifting harmonies, ominously caressing frequencies. The most suitable adjective – typical of the bulk of Schütze’s output – is “ineffable”. As soon as we think of having barely grasped some geometry or sequence of events, something immediately happens that puts our weak convictions in jeopardy.
About 64 minutes pass as one gradually reaches the condition to which the title alludes. Nonetheless, while we proceeded in the listening act a feeling of non-belonging referred to the surrounding materiality emerged from the subconscious. If, on the one hand, this saves us from the depressing ordinariness and collective mental confusion we observe on a daily basis, on the other the realization of entering the final stage of a process of definitive seclusion – however productive and ultimately healthy – hits the guts quite hard.
Intuitive communication through resonance exists, though, and Schütze is a worthy demonstrator of this principle. The problem, if anything, might lie in the different levels of the receivers. Schütze’s insights deal with both interactivity and psychoactivity, therefore we hope that no one uses this record as a background, thus losing a wealth of subliminal messages and codes. They mean much more than the parrot repetition of laws fabricated by the physiological limits of those unable to face an often ruthless reality.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 