Orson Hentschel – Facades

orson-hentschel-facades

CD – Denovali

A cryptic female voice says something in Korean. The narration develops theatrically, following some embracing, warm and disturbing ways. The background electronics is accurately unraveled, with insisting and anxious atmospheres. The multimedia artist Orson Hentschel enjoys musical structures accurately dramatized, where the audio and textual elements together define multi-sided settings and characters. The border between an authentic experimental composition and a contemporary but cinematic project is always uncertain: the first facade has some fascinating, cyber and metropolitan connotations, typical of oneiric introspection and stream of consciousness. The setting is made with no attempt to save anything about futurism and it shows a ritual and cathartic evolution, with a large space given to the synthetic sounds, that are not a mere complement of the non-sense dialogue in an obscure language, if we also consider that the lyrics don’t follow a plot or a specific meaning. The word here has the same value as any other musical element, it’s just a part of many which reflects the development of the work. The idea of this new Denovali release was born when Hentschel was facing a serious state of creative block. So, writing about nothing seemed the only honest way to express himself, with a measured rhythm and with the electronics to complement the spoken performance by Danhee Joe, who made the translation. The contrast between the lyrics and the music should have started some main mechanisms, providing the right support to a creativity mainly audio-visual and combinatiorics. However, the energy is physically palpable and thrills at listening with its more clear melodic forms and in the hidden spaces, in the pauses of declamation and in what it is said, but not understood. Despite being less abstract than former releases, this work is still focused on formal elements and on the language: something becomes something else, repetitive and minimal electronic sounds layers overlap each other and the listener is on a constant edge between illusion and allusion.

 

Orson Hentschel – Facades