Maria Chávez: “Plays” (Stefan Goldmann's 'Ghost Hemiola')
Macro

Stefan Goldmann: Veiki
Macro

With these recent releases, the Berlin-based Macro imprint continues to uphold its reputation for innovative experimentalism, Stefan Goldmann's Veiki a characteristically original take on club music and Plays a bold response to Goldmann's Ghost Hemiola by turntablist Maria Chávez. Issued in 2013, his rather Cagean double-vinyl set, a recording of empty locked grooves that features no sound other than surface noise, is something of an anti-Metal Machine Music, with Goldmann's ‘silence' the antithesis of Reed's barrage. Having received Ghost Hemiola as a birthday present, Chávez quickly realized that in being such a tabula rasa the material would allow for unlimited creative possibilities in an interpretative response.

An established turntablist, conceptual sound artist, and DJ, the Lima-born and NYC-based Chávez has participated in various artist residencies, been a research fellow at Goldsmiths University, and has presented her work internationally in solo exhibitions and sound installations. Her abstract approach to turntablism is presented in the instructional book she published in 2012 under the title OF TECHNIQUE: Chance Procedures on Turntable. Chávez's improvised solo performances involve the transformation through physical manipulations of recorded sounds from vinyl records.

As one would expect, Plays is no ordinary DJ mix, and anyone expecting club beats should look elsewhere. Instead, it's a one-hour, eleven-part electroacoustic examination that applies extensive digital processes to Goldmann's project. Largely eschewing anything remotely resembling a regulated pulse, the material in her hands swoops, sputters, writhes, and roars. Helixes of metallic shards splinter apart during one episode, brutal industrial convulsions build into climaxes in another. Moments of relative calm morph into disturbing, monstrous frequencies of bone-rattling force, after which ghostly clicks stream through fog like a stalker's footsteps. Elements burble and wail during the fifth part like alien chatter magnified to facilitate linguistic analysis. As unsettling as some episodes are, they're balanced by others of a more peaceful and calming disposition.

The trip's obviously unusual, but it's also engrossing, especially when it's impossible to know where Plays is going until it arrives. Exploiting the potential of the physical vinyl disc and intangible digital audio, Chávez generates an uneasy listen that's experimental and explorative yet playful, too. Hearing it makes one want to see her live to witness how exactly she coaxes such sounds into being.

Like her, Goldmann's a DJ and composer but many other things besides. He co-founded Macro in 2007 with Finn Johannsen, authored the book PRESETS – Digital Shortcuts to Sound, and has made a distinguishing mark on techno and electronic music. While he's created works for ensembles, film, and ballet, much of his artistic energy has focused on recasting techno in new ways, Veiki a perfect example. At the surface level, it might pass for machine techno; closer inspection, however, reveals that in place of the customary 4/4, Goldmann's used odd-numbered metres of 7/16, 9/8, and 11/16 for the nine tracks. Such asymmetric alterations give the material a restless quality when the center of gravity associated with traditional techno's displaced.

It's obviously not the first time irregular metres have been used. Forward-thinkers such as Steve Coleman, Robert Fripp, and John McLaughlin have structured their compositions using unconventional time signatures; it is, however, rare for a music producer to apply the concept to a club genre, given its reliance on pulses to which floorfillers can easily respond. To Goldmann's credit, his tracks, as asymmetric as their metres are, engage the body with immediacy and sound unusual but not unnatural. The 7/16 pulse powering the blistering “Etropolis,” for example, swings as hard as any 4/4 banger, and even the hiccup in the jittery 9/8 of “Makara” isn't enough to negate its flow.

“Planinar” introduces the release with dub-techno-styled whooshes and bluster, but it doesn't take long for a sleek, rubbery pulse to assert itself. In its rhythmic drive, Goldmann's material exhibits a single-minded determination that might have you thinking of a prototypical Ostgut Ton release; his melodic sensibility is very much consistent with the unusual slant he's consistently brought to his material, techno or otherwise. When rhythms cycle so feverishly as they do during “Sofra” and the particularly thunderous “Katran,” the effect is positively gyroscopic.

January 2020