Dieb 13 - Restructuring
(Charhizma)
Dieter Kovacic's projects, which range from the Copyright-baiting turntablized techno of ©
to the fine-tuned improv interaction of Efzeg and Printer, have in common a particular
attitude toward recorded music. Kovacic sees a recording not as an end but as an intermediate
and unfinished state. He offers his own music for use by others under the terms of "open
content license," and he expects the same courtesy in return. Fortunately, many of the
musicians within his circle feel the same way about the absurdity of international
copyright laws, so Kovacic always has plenty of material to feed his samplers, turntables,
CD players, and hard-disk recorders. Like Erik M, the Marseilles-based turntablist noted
for his keen, improv-oriented approach, Kovacic thrives in the performance arena. In the
30-minute "Formlos," recorded live in Graz, Austria at 1999's Musikprotokoll festival,
sound debris accumulates like dirt on a snowball. Kovacic offers minor climaxes along the
way to an unsteadily ratcheting crescendo of sculpted noise, with as many deliberate dead
ends to keep the course unpredictable. "Formlos" leaves you guessing as to the ultimate
destination of its accumulating spring-loaded tension tones, percussive bumps, enervated
air-raid sirens, and mechanically manhandled samples. During one memorable section,
white-noise whistles, and electronic outbursts obliterate a pretty guitar piece. At
another point, radio samples pile up atop microsonic events like a crumbling heap of
pistachio shells. The selection peaks with a FX-enhanced shouting match that deteriorates
into FM interference. Good, lively stuff, which sometimes sounds an awful lot like Coil's
self-remixed Stolen and Contaminated Songs, right down to the omlagus garfungi-loops. Though
recorded a year later, live, in Vienna's Sperrmuell Studios, "Restructuring" revisits the
'99 Festival in a rather clever way. Kovacic limits his source material to performance
recordings of Musikprotokoll participants. So fellow turntablist Marina Rosenfeld,
Christian Fennesz, Radian, Rupert Huber, Bernhard Lang, Salvatore Sciarrino, and
Brian Ferneyhough all find their individual sets reworked into one 35-minute
meta-performance. The material, notable for its various combinations of pure
electronics, sampling, instruments, and digital manipulation, makes for a rich
assortment of sounds. Kovacic shrewdly forgoes excess or overload, adopting a fussy,
John Wall-like re-compositional approach to scant fragments culled from the source
material. "Restructuring" is considerably more deliberate and academic than the
light, cartoonish "Formlos." Gradient tone fields collide with corrupted sine waves and
throbbing static. Pinpoint samples seed a seemingly barren sound environment, generating
clusters of piano notes, stifled electronic reports, and short-lived sax flurries. Violin
scrapes and string plucks surface spontaneously, only to melt like wax tapers back into
the same teeming stillness. Kovacic's composition is enigmatic, held together by pregnant
silence and the frailest thread of linearity, but the cumulative effect of all its
restructured incidents and accidents is quite compelling.
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