Wolfgang Mitterer: Radio Fractal (Beat Music)

Hatology 606

Ever so slowly over the last couple years, the Hat labels have been dipping their toes into the electroacoustic waters. Sometimes this has taken place under the auspices of their new music subsidiary, Hat Now, but there have also been some fine improvisational releases on Hatology (most notably the excellent Trapist recording Highway My Friend). When I scanned the personnel on this release, I got pretty excited: it features Max Nagl on baritone sax, John Schröder on electric guitar, Herbert Reisinger on drums, dieb 13 on turntables, and Patrick Pulsinger, Erdem Tunakan, and Mitterer on electronics.

Commissioned by the Southwest German Radio for the famous festival at which it was recorded, this release consists of two sprawling hours (actually a 65:58 disc one and a 48:30 disc two) of improvisation by the collected musicians. And for the most part, I must say it’s a crashing bore. It possesses little to none of what I like best about electroacoustic improvisation (and what, based on the participants, I was hoping for and expecting): subtlety, restraint, and a knowing elision of idiomatic reference. To me, and to a lot of people really excited by the use of electronics in improvisation, the music succeeds in direct proportion to the absence of hackneyed sampling (decontextualized human voices, airplane noises, or remote-sounding genre music, to take three of the most obvious examples, all unfortunately done to death here) therein. What’s more, this stuff is generally impressive when it resists or quashes altogether the individuated “soloing” that characterizes other modes of free improvisation (which is, of course, perfectly successful in other contexts).

Instead, these guys mostly tread idiomatic water in a pretty tiresome way, generating a never-ending stream of click-track grooves (which Reisinger hammers home with none of the compelling percussive sorcery of, say, Martin Brandlmayr), the occasional saxophonic noodle, and regular excursions of early-McLaughlin freakery from Schröder (a really good player who just doesn’t sound at home here, and who consequently reduces much of this to jam-band mess). With some superficial similarities to Dave Douglas’ Sanctuary project, the continual reliance on beat box rhythms and noodling instrumentalism here just occludes the possibilities that might otherwise be generated by dieb 13 and the other electronicians (who generally resort to Casio beats, pitch-bending, and the occasional feedback storm).

Harry Lachner’s liner notes faff on a good long while about the theoretical and compositional roots of Mitterer’s production. Predictably, as with a lot of music that involves samplers, there are abundant references to parallel motives/strategies, layering, fragments, and so forth. But you know what? It still sounds like sloppy jam-band music weighed down by (rather than liberated by) healthy doses of ambient texture.