Noid - Monodigmen

Noid
Monodigmen
aRtonal
aRR06

Cellist Noid (Arnold Habert) takes an interesting approach to his solo improvisations here, combing a kind of minimalist-derived structure to a very rough and visceral attack, resulting in what might be thought of as a cellistic (!) equivalent to music like that of Charlemagne Palestine where mirage-like details emerge from the melding of repetition with chaos.

There are thirteen tracks, ranging in length from a handful in the 10-12 minute area to a bunch of shorter ones, two clocking in at less than ten seconds. The opener, “melodien”, is the cello as respiratory system, an in/out bowed figure with thump that sounds like something you might pick up by inserting a contact mic into your lung. I get the impression, here and elsewhere, that Noid adapts his bow in various ways, including loosening it a great deal. The wooliness that results is part of what enables the music to transcend the relatively simple patterns generated. The second piece, “herz”, employs a repeated six note sequence, first in the middle register, then the lower, that isn’t essentially much different from one you might hear in early Steve Reich. As there, however, the obsessive repetition either a) allows hidden sound aspects to emerge or b) the listener creates these emergent qualities on his/her own. I’m not sure which and less sure if it matters. So, for instance, I begin to hear an accented three-note pattern within the latter six-note one. The grainy and corporeal way Noid aggressively plunges into these pieces goes a long way toward laying a messily fertile field for such meta-patterns to develop. When he switches to a cleaner attack, as on “vacuum”, with its high register swirls that unfortunately but unavoidably remind one of “Flight of the Bumblebee”, my interest waned and I found myself listening to the random taps and rubbings that the vigorous performance entailed—perhaps that’s the point. “instrument [containing: urlaub]” reduces any notion of pattern down to one, unsteadily wavering, bowed tone and succeeds in a more purely meditative way. There’s a very attractive, shorter track, “irgendwas”, whose delicate strummings remind me a little of Arild Anderson’s work of the early 70s, followed by a tangentially similar, shimmering piece; both are rather lovely. The final selection seems to retain a pattern of sorts though its extreme spacing of very quiet bow scratches makes it (pleasingly) difficult for the listener to think in pattern terms. It gives the impression of lying somewhere just on this side of the ppp improv of the Malfatti school.

“Monodigmen”, I found, grew on me the more I listened and repays close attention. Its range may be limited, but Noid teases out some pretty fascinating tufts of ideas from his obsession.