We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Silence And Flies: Peter Kowald Live At Nigglm​ü​hle

by Peter Kowald

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $9 USD  or more

     

1.
Niggl 1 46:30
2.
Niggl 2 22:34

about

The world in a double bass.
Peter Kowald has chosen the path of the traveler. He tells us stories of his journeys through the world. We hear him speak. Through the bass. We believe we understand his words. Listen to his bass-stories. He caught the world in his playing, a wide world, wider than the world of most people. He created a reproduction of the world and rendered it onto his bass. He thus contributed to the emancipation of the bass, as has no other. He abolished the borders around this instrument.

Kowald was communicator and integrator. Time and time again, this man, tirelessly searching for new encounters, put himself into the solitude of improviser in solo concert. As the wise man retreats to find himself, Kowald withdrew into the solo. Just him and his instrument. There was something monumental about it. During a solo the improviser is alone, dependent on himself, everybody watches him. A man who moved so much, who brought together so many people - why does he play solo? In a conversation he said: "I have always been fighting with the tension, to be on stage, what you call stage-fright, a kind of fear. That has hindered me very much in dealing with the music more freely. Sometimes I was in despair. (...) Solo is a good school. One can formulate something alone, without the help of anyone. The process is not determined by others. Solo makes you independent."

This music is not for cowards. It can't be backgrounded as acoustic wallpaper. Nobody can sink into the sweet mush here. Auditory habits are like ax-blows, always in the same notch, but that's not what it's about: it's about the active engagement of the listener to consummate the artistic sound work of art. Those without patience should forget about it. When we have agreed that the term, dissonance, is to be dropped, it's really simple. We overcome the dictatorship of the keynote, the tyranny of the scales, and get instead a democracy of ground characters: innumerable tone series, not only from the twelve half-tones of the octave, but quarter-tones, microintervals, finest nuance, modulation. Throughout his journeys, the improviser gets a mass of fragments, using his sense organs to tear them out of the world and save them, so that the memories aren't lost. But the big bow is broken time and time again. Over time he realises that he keeps spinning the same story. From the fog that still covers the world, only fragments of mountains loom, which he combines into a sequence, according to their different natural cover, colour, ruptures, folding, gives the sequence rhythm, phrases it, and uses it later in an entirely different surrounding. Kowald can only snatch at threads. The reality is too fast for him. More than fragments are not possible. He did not knuckle down to the dictatorship of detail. The single parts maintain their function. We remember that when Kowald played, he became bigger and broader, the tone of his bass filled the room. In low, gentle, muted passages he seemed to crawl inside his instrument.

A bass is no horn, no percussion, no synthesizer - and yet Kowald creates an orchestra with his instrument. He turns into an Indian goddess with four pairs of arms, conducting and threatening the imaginary musicians. He tickles them, beats, strangles, strokes, and calms them down. His arms tangle, tying up, like an octopus in love, detangling, forming the gesture of closure. Magic conducting. A sawing melody tears ridgey nicks. Kowald's bow produces an ear-splitting squeal. Steel ropes are tautly stretched, crackling metal splashes sparks. He weaves a heavy velvet curtain, which he ironically decorates with quicksilver stars. Behind this he builds a castle of cello sounds with baroque decoration: reminiscences of Bach's Cello Suite, which has already Chinese-Whispered its way around the world.

Finally, it is not about less than the authentic experiences of a world traveler in terms of music. An incessant accelerating and breaking, compressing and loosening, until the musical time-journey gets into a state of endless spiral movement. Getting nowhere on a frantic ride. Finally, he knows that there are no borders, but twilight-zones, crossings between the contents of experiences, which take something from one, and then, from the next one, take something in advance. Zones of transitions. Transitions. Kowald fathoms all possibilities to bring the bass to sound. In his sound-world the normal contrabass sound is only one of many. Kowald's phenomenal bow-technique allows him to speak to us. Not only does he use the bow to draw. He drums with it, puts the sticks between the strings, lets them vibrate, Glissandi, Slap Bass, metallic Flageolet-Tones, a bass drone reminiscent of a journey to Siberia, into the centre of silence. Horse head fiddle. Kowald, the shaman, lets us hear a choir. A swarming, scraping, scratching, rubbing. Twilight-zone-sounds. The Manhattan skyline. Apocalyptic passages. Then again, a broken music-box, most artificial. One wants to see the film. This is more modern, more Utopian, than most that is offered to us as the last word in computer music.

Kowald continues where Mingus stopped. Also Free Jazz. With his sense of timing, gained in innumerable ensemble sessions, he plucks a rhythm that has no definite beat, but is still felt as organic, a fast pulse which swirls the pictures into abstract reflexes, like projections on the surface of liquid metal, distorted beat grapes melt together with tone mounds of splintering glass, shards spray, breaking the light. And the music breathes.

-Dietrich Rauschtenberger

credits

released January 1, 2005

Peter Kowald - Double Bass

All music composed by Peter Kowald.
Recorded 29.6.2001 at Nigglmühle, Bernbeuren (Germany) by Klaus Büttermann.
Mixed and mastered by Dirk Peters.

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Free Elephant Brooklyn, New York

Free Elephant is a label based in Wuppertal, Germany, founded by Peter Kowald, Gunda Gottschalk and Dirk Peters. Originally focusing on the release of Kowald’s works after his untimely death in 2002, it has expanded to release recordings from collaborators and friends, devoted to the sensitivity and desire to communicate among improvisers.



Digital Distribution administered by Hans Tammen.
... more

contact / help

Contact Free Elephant

Streaming and
Download help

Report this album or account

If you like Silence And Flies: Peter Kowald Live At Nigglmühle, you may also like: