Dreamscape: Label Profile

When I contacted composer, multi-instrumentalist and Dreamscape front man (owner?) Hermann Bühler with some mundane questions about the label’s history and future plans, I received the following enigmatic response:

The label press states that “authentic” art is their MO, but the fragmentary dream images speak more to the music on offer than does all the more coherent hype. Dreamscape—the name of this Zurich-based label is apt in that it conjures both the solidity and durability of earthly structures and the fluidity of the dream state. The sounds on the five discs under discussion fall into that increasingly nebulous area known as “improvised” music, a topic to which Bühler has devoted a great deal of time and scholarly effort. Each disc defies simple jazz/classical/rock categorization, but more importantly, each performance self-consciously erodes the boundaries between aspects of itself, so that, when successful, each set of structural and sonic moments coheres to form wholes which, through surprise, exceed initial expectation.

Cristo Fontecilla’s quartet disc—the only project here which does not feature Bühler—is the “straightest” of the bunch. No disrespect is meant by this, as the players and tunes are absolutely top-notch, but it is the most easily categorizable, admirably fitting the mold of the guitar-based quartet. That said, a wealth of diverse influences is evident from the opening of the first track, where Fontecilla’s guitar sports some tasteful distortion. When he solos, impressive bebop runs and bent blues riffs surprise at every turn, and the other musicians are clearly his equal. The disc hops genres throughout, from beautifully sentimental ballads to raunchy funk and rock with the distortion cranked, but this post-modern ethos never seems forced or contrived. As would be expected from a Barcelona-based group, the Spanish influence is often palpable in timbre and mode choice, the liner notes even implying that Arabic scales have been employed. The brew is jazz, but it’s a multi-flavored mixture.

Sojourn has been filed in the "New Age" category, but this worn-out label does not do justice to a reflectively beautiful collection of clarinet and sarod soundscapes, sometimes accompanied by tabla and vocals. True, the mood is largely meditative, but as with Arve Henriksen’s recent Chiaroscuro, metric and timbral shifts bubble just below the surface to create an unsettling current beneath an otherwise smooth veneer. Bühler’s penchant for clarinet multiphonics is prevalent throughout the latter portion of the disc, where they ferment, often heterophonically, with Moskow’s sarod to create wonderfully jarring dissonances that bespeak familiarity and comfort with both modern classical idioms and world musics.

Multiphonics are the main building blocks on Alto Solo Bühler's introspective exploration of the alto saxophone. The textural and timbral play is here in abundance, in a much less subtle form than on Sojourn, but serially presented. Tempi, breathing, vibrato and articulation change almost from moment to moment; each piece has a one word title, almost as if a half-hearted attempt is being made to contain these ever-shifting parameters in a concise verbal appellation. Bühler is clearly paying homage to both Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker here, and his knowledge of the instrument’s capabilities is simultaneously encyclopedic and practical. Semitonal motivic fragments present in the earlier pieces on the disc return to create a cyclic whole, to Bühler’s further compositional credit, and the recording is mysteriously spacious and ambient.

Unfortunately, the most “composed” set of pieces achieves the most uniform and mundane results. Seven Pieces sports an elaborate compositional scheme in which every aspect is predetermined—group placement, time, tempo, vocal delivery, etc. Global coordinates determine much of what occurs here, but even given such an elaborate plan, the performance as a whole does little to spark long-term interest. Each instrumentalist certainly develops interesting rhythmic patterns with very sparse pitch material, but the net result is fragmented, the constituent parts seeming disconnected from each other as if the metric modulations of an Elliott Carter string quartet had gotten off-track. Even Bonnie Barnett’s vocal squeaks and rasps do not rise convincingly above the miasma. It is possible that another performance would yield better results if, as the score stipulates, a different set of instruments was used.

The other large-scale piece under discussion here, Earthbound, is possibly the pick of the litter. Another Bühler composition, this time focusing on Native American concerns, Earthbound builds and subsides in slow waves over the course of a single forty minute gesture. Fredy Studer’s well-timed but incredibly sparse percussion work opens the piece with vast stretches of silence out of which Bonnie Barnett’s vocals growl, squeak, moan and shudder. As in Berio’s Visage, the vocals are mainly emotive phonics, while Bühler manipulates pre-recorded vocal and percussion tracks over the live improvisational events. So seamless is the integration of live and recorded elements that they are indistinguishable when the piece builds to white-heat intensity. These flashes of lightning alternate with gorgeous expanses of stereophonically swirling drone. Classical, jazz and even post-rock are convincingly merged to create a disc truly representative of the Dreamscape moniker, even though it’s actually on For 4 Ears!

While Dreamscape has had many earlier CD-R releases, I look forward with keen anticipation to more catalog items from a promising roster of players and composers.

~ Marc Medwin