LP – Fragment Factory

Suffering For The Promised is a sound project developed by Stefan Roigk over the past 14 years. During this time, he has faced some joys, yieldings, reprises and new versions, and experienced moments when he wasn’t sure what to do or even whether to continue the project . Now these layers are all condensed in 16 minutes, and in their definite form are part of the catalog of Fragment Factory, an independent label based in Hamburg and founded in 2009 by Michael Muennich. The track presented is structured and vivid, and based on an evanescent set of sounds, almost intangible, made by short recordings in the field and devotional vocal fragments, lappings and vortexes. The small shocks attract our attention, similar to when a specific detail draws our eye in a shop window. What the light does in other sets is here activated by a careful attention to the sonic grain; to the volume of the emission; to the timbers and the times of the vibratory phenomenon; and to the modulation of pauses and reprises and moments of drips, frictions and harmonic moments. Roigk, who lives and works in Berlin, has formerly published work on labels such as Tochnit Aleph, Senufo and Eh?. This is his first release with Michael Muennich’s label, which also released an interesting work by Christina Kubisch this year and another equally dense and cohesive record from Leif Elggren. While Roigk shows his best in sound installations and multimedia projects, it’s clear that Suffering For The Promised is a work he deeply fought for, which expresses some very intimate emotions, connected to precise thoughts about sounds and atmospheres. We wouldn’t specifically define this release as “a poetic manifesto”, but surely we face something similar – an abstract resounding work, whose frequencies are ghostly, harsh and rising and whose passages are vividly imaginative and only apparently uncoordinated, placed alongside fleeting vocal recordings and very sensitive audio collage.

 

Stefan Roigk – Suffering For The Promised