By listening to this joint effort by Will Montgomery and Heribert Friedl one realizes that the act of creating a certain kind of music doesn’t differ too much from taking a deep breath in the silence of a forest during a solitary walk, and – eyes closed – determining what’s heard in that very moment, and from where those manifestations arrive. These gentlemen are definitely interested in the same musical areas, the ones where improvisation and structural definition meet; exactly in that territory they tried to mingle talents, starting a collaboration in the spring of 2006. Friedl recorded himself playing his hackbrett (essentially, a cimbalom), then sent the files to Montgomery for opportune treatment and addition of electronic sources, and vice versa. After a while the composer realized that things weren’t working, consequently deciding of “absorbing Heribert’s material into his own”.
Montgomery’s style is informed by a Feldmanesque penchant for giving each occurrence an almost perfect position in an ample space, the latter usually coincident with something approaching total quietness. Not one of his sounds seems to expand further than the strict necessary, yet – when the composition requires it – he’s ready to elongate and stretch the raw matter until it resembles a series of blurry apparitions, isolated events in a somewhat introverted aural landscape where peripheral, but not extraneous factors are positively welcome in delineating the listener’s background, both physically and psychologically. The amalgamation of Friedl’s mutated strings and Montgomery’s electronics works just fine in that sense, the acoustic quintessence of the hackbrett swallowed and regurgitated, appearing as a fluid entity designed to measure a room’s width through refraction and echoing shapelessness rather than represent a sonic item per se.
Not necessarily revolutionary, Non-Collaboration is an album whose neat chilliness and inflexible logic hide several instants of concentrated, unpolluted beauty, provided that we’re paying special attention. Although these artists are well conscious of how an installation soundscape should work, ambient music it ain’t – you’ll have to wear Spock’s ears this time.
~ Massimo Ricci
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