Case Study: Sertão

Two gen­er­a­tions cross over two coun­tries. Mile­na Kipfmüller uses tape mate­r­i­al of the 70ies done by her father Gün­ter Kipfmüller in north-east Brazil: record­ings of pop­u­lar trav­el­ling musi­cians in the ser­tao that trans­form news and sto­ries in vir­tu­ous­ly impro­vised poet­ry, the “vio­leiros”. The source mate­r­i­al enters a nowa­days process of elec­tron­ic trans­for­ma­tion in dia­logue with the three oth­er string instru­ments. Vio­la and cel­lo are played by father and son, Guil­herme and Ernesto Rodrigues, thus by two gen­er­a­tions that com­pose in their own, dif­fer­ent (ana­logue) lan­guages. Klaus Janek at the con­tra­bass, com­bines both aspects in his artis­tic prac­tice, the ana­logue instru­ment and elec­tron­ics – bridg­ing the two duos of gen­er­a­tions and trans­for­ma­tion process­es.

Andrzej Nowak spon­ta­neous­mu­sic­tri­bune

Mile­na Kipfmüller /​ Ernesto Rodrigues /​ Guil­herme Rodrigues /​ Klaus Janek case study: Sertão (Cre­ative Sources, CD 2020)

We end our today’s Por­tuguese sto­ry in… Berlin! Mile­na Kipfmüller (tape and elec­tron­ics) and Klaus Janek (dou­ble bass and elec­tron­ics) as Sound­ing Sit­u­a­tion some time ago record­ed intrigu­ing mate­r­i­al that con­sumed the sounds of a live dou­ble bass, elec­tron­ics and field record­ings from Brazil, from the 70s of the last cen­tu­ry (songs called Vio­leiros; we wrote about this idea when dis­cussing the dou­ble bassist’s 5‑disc epic). Now we get a kind of reprise of this project (record­ed last year), and for its imple­men­ta­tion were invit­ed – Ernesto Rodrigues on the vio­la and Guil­herme Rodrigues on the cel­lo. The whole musi­cal jour­ney (one track) is 46 and a half min­utes.

We are invit­ed to the land of elec­tro-acoustic non-obvi­ous­ness when we are invit­ed by stringed instru­ments that flow low (dou­ble bass) and extreme­ly high (vio­la and cel­lo) – rum­ble, squeal, seem light, elu­sive, but also extreme­ly mas­sive. The whole thing, although a bit gen­tle at first, has its own rhythm, its some­times hid­den dynam­ics. Elec­tron­ic sounds do a lot from start to fin­ish. In gen­er­al, they cre­ate a mys­te­ri­ous back­ground, some­times they are the result of some live pro­cess­ing activ­i­ties, they nev­er go out of line, and most of all, they force field sounds into the stringed nar­ra­tive in an inter­est­ing way. The lat­ter appear after a few min­utes. They are looped, mutat­ed, as if they came to us from a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent world. Kind of cham­ber with field elec­tron­ic taste! The Por­tuguese are per­fect­ly stuck to this Ger­man idea – they pre­pare sounds when nec­es­sary, oth­er times they flow in long, charm­ing pas­sages, and they do not look for silence on the fin­ger­boards of their instru­ments.

The first real excit­ing moment is around 14 min­utes, when this elec­tro-acoustic bun­dle of sounds falls into an almost med­i­ta­tive pulse, not with­out a dark ambi­ent fla­vor. After anoth­er few min­utes, a lot of good comes to us from the dou­ble bass neck, which rum­bles and rum­bles con­nect­ed to the cables, like a mutat­ed bass gui­tar. Soon after, as a result of a com­bi­na­tion of sev­er­al cir­cum­stances, flow takes on a dub echo, and the atmos­phere of post-tech­no Berlin from 25 years ago seems to be tri­umphant. There is no end to the kalei­do­scope of intrigu­ing and sur­pris­ing sounds. The strings fall into a demon­ic dance, beau­ti­ful­ly plung­ing into the pul­sat­ing drones of elec­tron­ics and heav­i­ly processed field record­ings. At around 22 min­utes, the artists offer us a moment of breath­ing and sen­su­al pas­sages of pure­ly acoustic string sounds, after which the splash­es of vio­leiros enter the action again, which sow anx­i­ety and seem to ask exis­ten­tial ques­tions about the place of sound in time and space. Just before 30 min­utes is over, we have a real pile of sounds and emo­tions. The string orches­tra and elec­troa­coustic ambi­ent take a won­der­ful toll! Before this great sto­ry final­ly resounds, we still have a short descent into silence, pas­sages of string saw­ing and grind­ing, and a drone phase that seems to build up like a thun­der­storm in light­ning. The final of the record­ing is full of elec­tro-acoustic sound pearls, it fades to the accom­pa­ni­ment of live sounds and anoth­er reprise of voic­es straight from the Brazil­ian jun­gle.