Gunter Muller - Live & Replayed

Esquilo
ES009/ESINS003

An interesting two disc set, mainly for overlapping two periods of Gunter Muller’s work between which, at least going by the recorded examples I’ve heard, a shift seems to have taken place in his overall approach.

Disc One contains three live performances, one each from Sydney, Paris and Kyoto, recorded between May 2002 and April 2004. They’re all very good, in fact about as rich and enjoyable as any solo Muller I’ve heard. While his music has always had a certain underlying smoothness—I sometimes think of the non-existent term: “swallowability”—there’s plenty of grit tossed into the gears in the form of bowed metal, non-rhythmic scrapes and clicks, etc. Describing the cumulative effect of Muller’s music has always struck me as unusually difficult as it tends to be just that: cumulative. Especially in live performance, I’ve found myself more or less drifting with the flow during the actual music and then, upon its completion, saying, “Wow!” as it all hits home making exact sense in retrospect. These performances have a good bit of that character, subtle in ways we’ve come to expect, always “Muller-ish”, but feeling very complete, deeply considered and substantial after it’s over. In very recent years (again, at least from what I’ve encountered), Muller’s music has been sanded somewhat too cleanly, beveled out into a far more lush, sometimes overly homogenized sound. While retaining a great deal of attractiveness, I’ve come to miss his more rough and tumble self and these reworkings of earlier material tend to fall into that area, at least in part. Still, sometimes he manages to overcome those constrictions and emerge in fascinating territory as on the third track of Disc Two, derived from the Sydney performance, a shimmering, tonal flux that works as well as any Eno-esque ambient piece I’ve heard in years.

In sum, “Live & Replayed” is something of a mixed bag, decidedly worthwhile for the first portion, hit and miss for the second but even at that, one finds intriguing things being extracted and, possibly, hints at future areas of investigation.

Esquilo