UMS ‘n JIP‘s latest large-scale work im störgarten: an 80-minute song cycle for voice, recorder and live electronics setting a collection of 25 poems by Swiss poet Rolf Hermann. Even now, over a fortnight later, i’ve been finding myself remembering and reflecting upon this piece, which spoke with a very direct emotional weight. Hermann’s heartfelt texts are both a celebration of a natural environment (specifically Leukerfeld) with which he has a long history, and a lament about the way it has been transformed into a place of modern industry and enterprise. (From Hermann’s notes: “Fields and meadows have given way to commercial and industrial zones, a golf course and a motorway.”) The poems convey a strong sense of continuity and interconnection, and this was reflected in the music, seamlessly moving through the texts such that im störgarten effectively became a single, large, composite song. For what felt like the longest time everything indicated hushed reverence: soft drones and whispers, the gentlest of pulses, some electronic pitch and noise tracery. What was being established here was a sonic sacred space, a hallowed musical habitat into which, around halfway through, suddenly, absurdly, there came beats. The juxtaposition was utmost startling, ancient meeting modern, smooth timelessness suddenly confronted by hard-edged transience, as if the mellifluous contours of plainchant were being articulated as rap. As in the words, so in the music: nothing was the same after this. Hitherto focused and cohesive, the second half of im störgarten was a tense mixture of twin strands – sacred and secular, to continue the analogy – speaking in parallel, and the sense of a single, increasingly fragmented and halting attempt to navigate through the familiar turned foreign. The fact that the work managed to arrive at a similar musical point to where it began seemed to suggest not so much resolution as retreat, figuratively – the penultimate poem includes the words, “I hover quietly, completely absorbed in myself” – visually – the final poem speaks of how “we change over into the redeeming night” and literally, returning from whence we came. Simultaneously simple, subtle and strange, reinforced by occasional projected images of landscape and industrial development, im störgarten is the most powerful work by UMS ‘n JIP that i’ve yet experienced, testifying to the deep wounds that can be caused by the inevitable, unstoppable, march of progress. (5against4.com, 3/2023)

Javier Hagen‘s 4 Kafka-Erzählungen [4 Kafka Stories]: (…) a surreal, fantastical space in which disparate elements collided. Electronic blips and glitches sat beside curiously retro synth patterns, languid trip hop beats, tolling bells and birdsong, these elements sometimes only appearing for the briefest moment before vanishing again. The vocal line moved through all this with an imperturbable serenity, eventually arriving at a place of peaceful resolution that, though it seemed incredible, made total sense. The more i hear of Javier Hagen’s music the more entranced i am by its wonderfully weird, leftfield approach to appropriation and juxtaposition. (5against4.com, 3/2023)

Most entertaining: ‘Adventurous Sounds’, a concert billed as being “New Music for and with children” as part of a project aimed at introducing contemporary music to young people, which also extends to in-school activities. One of the most hilarious compositions i’ve ever heard, Motoharu Kawashima‘s Das Lachenmann IV, began the concert, preceded on this occasion by an equally funny session where the audience was taught to sing several isolated bars from the score, which were projected onto the wall. It was fantastic to see an audience of predominately young people engaging with new music as both listeners and, briefly, performers, and clearly having an absolute blast. The majority of the concert involved students from the Musikschule Konservatorium Zürich, all playing various recorders, who took part in a number of pieces alongside Hagen, Mayer-Spohn and members of the dissonArt ensemble. Particularly effective was Agnes Dorwarth‘s Nachtvögel; Gezwitscher; Nachtkrapp, a textural work made up of birdsong-like behaviours, concluding in a lovely chorus of modulating pitches. Dorwarth’s Kopfnuss-Trio was an even stronger, the three players using their headjoints to create something akin to a tribal chant, in a close unison peppered with rhythmic cries and glissandi. Two of the students turned Franz Müller-Busch‘s Der Streit into a brief but compelling argument, while another student, Sara Weinmann, gave a strong performance of Dorwarth’s Artikulator 1, channelling a range of emotions into sound in different ways, from disruptions and interruptions to the work’s flow to violent vocal eruptions, in a nicely-controlled melding of musical, non-musical and meta-musical ideas. The concert ended with an expanded version of Sancho’s Dream by UMS ‘n JIP, the original of which was part of the duo’s opera Sancho. In this new form it was utterly mesmerising, living up to its title by creating a dreamy, soft texture environment developing into what seemed to be accelerating Shepard tones. (5against4.com, 3/2023)

dissonArt gave a concert featuring another (very welcome) opportunity to hear Ulrike Mayer-Spohn‘s fKFW. Earlier in the day i’d hiked across the valley to the Bhutan Bridge, a narrow suspension bridge running over the (at the time completely dry) river Illbach/Leuk. Each side of the bridge is festooned with Buddhist prayer flags, and Mayer-Spohn’s music brought to mind the gentle, undulating rippling that these flags created. Always moving, always something happening, sometimes emerging as short-term moments of excitement and busyness, yet fKFK ultimately creates a stillness, a placidity, perhaps even a diffidence. Three years ago i likened the effect to a “sum total of a myriad superimposed ideas”; i wonder if it’s a actually a zero-sum situation, that sum total cancelling out into a silence. Either way, it was just as mesmerically wonderful as before. (5against4.com, 3/2023)

Yet more hypnotic was Ulrike Mayer-Spohn‘s fKFW which, though it used a larger ensemble than all the rest of these pieces – voice, recorder, flute, clarinet, violin and cello – may well have been the quietest piece performed during the whole festival. To describe one part of it is to describe all of it: a network of incredibly gentle undulations, rising and falling as an ensemble yet each player clearly unique and individual, as if following the contours of in- and exhalations, articulating a form of blissed out ecstasy, oblivious to everything except the self, the message and the feeling. The message was a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, speaking of the House of Rumour, being “a place at the centre of the world, between the zones of earth, sea, and sky […] There is no peace within: no silence anywhere. Yet there is no clamour, only the subdued murmur of voices…”. In keeping with that description, Mayer-Spohn rendered Ovid’s words as barely perceptible. At times, they seemed like a subliminal message at the cusp of consciousness; elsewhere they came across as a kind of sum total of a myriad superimposed ideas, resulting in the occasional glimpse of a word or phrase caught up and/or mingled with the never-ending instrumental texture. Utterly gorgeous. (5against4.com, 8/2020)

Students from the nearby Münster region, alongside Ensemble ö! and duo UMS ‘n JIP in a concert titled “Form and Colours”: It was an apt title, as the six works performed all utilised sound colour as the basis for music that was primarily textural. These textures were embellished, and occasionally enhanced, by a random array of rumbles and whistles contributed by strong winds outside the castle. This was particularly the case in Shintaro Imai‘s Subtle Oscillations, a work where live and electronic sounds were seamlessly blended. Indeed, at different points they each sounded like an extension of the other, revealing inner pitch details with varying clarity as the density fluctuated. The nature of the sounds was similarly characterised, melding obviously electronic noises with not merely acoustic sounds but evocations of the natural world, to create a music continually at a liminal point between a host of interpretations of ‘real’ and ‘artificial’. On previous occasions i’ve been deeply impressed by Ulrike Mayer-Spohn‘s music, and i was again by her new piece fÖ, receiving its première. Subtlety and restraint seem to characterise the soundworlds she likes to explore, and in fÖ the emphasis was on a delicate pitch environment, beginning from a chord materialising from nothing, where all notes seemed to be slowly rising. It became immersive, enveloped and surrounded on all sides by slow, suspended tones that continually formed new relationships, sometimes congregating together, other times more spread out, and occasionally coalescing on a unison. As with some of her previous work, there was the impression of an underlying process at work, yet one given a great deal of time and freedom to play out. One of the most striking pieces in the concert was Roland Moser‘s Mond, a miniature for three strings (with student Jana Sophia Schmidt as soloist) revolving around the folk tune ‘Au clair de la lune’. Here was another example of the outside elements being seemingly mirrored inside, with various notes of the tune initially obscured by harmonics before being more thoroughly erased, as if the notes had been blown or scoured from the page. It was like listening to an eroded old recording, battered and damaged, reduced to hauntological vestiges of an idea of a song. The wind also felt pertinent in Anton Svetlichny‘s Identity, which closed the concert, throwing us into a wall of noise seemingly channelled from what was beyond the castle walls. Clarified into a cloud of discrete actions, the impression was that the performers had become so many parts of a vast acoustic machine, the output of which comprised varying strengths of wind blown on and through it. The timbral complexity was marvellous, a continual, volatile tilting between pitch and noise such that they became one and the same. (5against4.com, 3/2024)