CD – Sofa

Ingar Zachn is a Norwegian percussionist and the creative head of Sofa Records. In this release, Before Nightfall One, he worked together with two other expert musicians devoted to this special music, undoubtedly one of the most primordial forms of art. But here the primordial elements are not actually a large part, because the overlap of techniques and isms produced a great body of knowledge of the instruments and their relationships, which could never be defined as rough or naif, despite being expressed or waved in free forms. In the past Zach has worked with similar bands (Mural, Dans les arbres, O3), but here it’s Speak Percussion who play the rules of the release. The musician had just one day to familiarize himself and try new settings until the concert and the final recording. The basic idea is in having an immediate syntony, without too many complications or frills, which leads to some experiments and to the final document of a single day of work. A specific attitude, an open mind based on a common land of sounds and measured eclecticism, is necessary for a good result of such a meeting. The recording was made at Substation in Melbourne, the perfect environment where Zach, Eugene Ughetti (art director of Speak) and Matthias Schack-Arnott gave life to some charming atmospheres, full of shimmering rhythms, never frozen in a specific technique or abused in the repetitions, as it happens in the contact improvisation dance by Steve Paxton, or in the rhythmic but not so dissonant and noisy electroacoustics. Along the continuum of the 35 minute long track there are some thorny passages or moments of interpretative risk, where the drums become divergent, but at the same time still keep their elegance, meditative character and dynamism. Some passages instead are more palpable and scraped, industrial or liquid. It’s a deep and atmospheric sound journey, full of abstract and tangled drums, sudden emissions and light tolls. Everything is combined in a fluctuating and stratified way, moving from obscure atmospheres to exciting moments, in a continuous change of status of soul. But the artists never try to exaggerate, searching for the syntony rather than the dissonance and building the instruments dialogue in a coherent, stylized and hyper-vivid manner.

 

Ingar Zach | Speak Percussion – Before Nightfall One