By Eyal Hareuveni

The Vienna-and-Berlin-based ensemble Polwechsel celebrates this yr its
thirtieth anniversary. This groundbreaking ensemble focuses on the interface
of collective improvisation and up to date composition, or how
compositional concepts serve collective improvisation. Polwechsel shifted
all through the years from radical reductionism and virtually stillness in
the Nineties, which focused on silence, background noises and
disruptions, to a change in route within the 2000s, which noticed the
introduction of conventional musical facets equivalent to tonal relationships,
concord and rhythm, all with out dramaturgical developments that steer
towards a climax, and democratic, non-hierarchal dynamics. Polwechsel is
now a quartet that includes founding members double bass participant Werner
Dafeldecker and cellist Michael Moser, and percussionists Martin
Brandlmayr and Burkhard Beins, who joined later. It included different
progressive musicians like guitarist Burkhard Stangl, trombonist Radu
Malfatti and sax participant John Butcher.

Embrace shouldn’t be a retrospective, however true to the group’s spirit, this
anniversary mission shouldn’t be a retrospective however a probe into an array of
recent potentialities. It’s a restricted version (of 300 copies) field set of
four-vinyl. Like-minded musicians and former members be a part of Polwechsel to
carry out eight new items reflecting the breadth of its diverse, and
demanding compositional and improvisation methods and investigations.
The field set consists of insightful essays by Free Jazz Weblog’s Stuart
Broomer who analyzes the style Polwechsel balances compositional
components and improvisation methods, in addition to every of the characters
of the compositions and concludes that “what in the end defines the
music of Polwechsel is its profound sense of thriller, an ineffable
high quality”; Austrian thinker Reinhard Kager who maps the seminal
influences and shifts that formed the aesthetics of Polwechsel; and
Viennese music journalist-producer-double bass participant Nina Polaschegg
who places chronicles Polwechsel withing the Viennese experimental scene
within the Nineties that fostered Polwechsel’s supposedly uneventful music and
the evolution of the ensemble.

Polwechsel hosts former member tenor and soprano sax participant John
Butcher, hyper-pianist Magda Mayas, Andrea Neumann who performs
deconstructed piano, an amplified custom-made body with strings, and
Austrian composer Klaus Lang who additionally performs harmonium and flute (Lang
collaborated earlier than with the ensemble on Unseen, ezz thetics, 2020).
Dafeldecker, Moser, Brandlmayr and Beins wrote new compositions, in
addition to 2 new compositions by Austrian composers Peter Ablinger
and Lang. These enigmatic and mysterious compositions discover inspiration
from such shocking sources like Jupiter’s “Nice Purple Spot” which
rotates counter-clockwise and creates winds of as much as 430 kilometers per
hour, the work of French spectralist composer of the Seventies Gérard
Grisey, and the opening and shutting sounds of elevator doorways,
touchstones widespread to each Christians and Buddhists, and the
Thirteenth-century church father Thomas Aquinas, whose ideas on economics,
rooted in Aristotle and waiting for Marx, or specializing in
decomposition in time – decomposition, evaluation, re-composition, and
rearrangement of components, and a sure willed anonymity whereas diminishing
the standing of specialised virtuosity. Broomer’s enlightening linear
notes add many particulars to every new composition.

However Embrace is far more than advanced technical and philosophical
particulars about music making. The 4 musicians of Polwechsel are
fearless and imaginative sound artists who’ve established distinctive
dynamics, and at instances of the ensemble as one, inseparable sonic entity.
Polwechsel retains experimenting and investigating compositional and
improvisation methods in its personal demanding and engaging approach, typically
culminating with mysterious, trance-like atmospheres characterised by
the colourful and hyper-resonant stillness that requires absolute
listening. The music of Polwechsel radiates a most humane and political
message as Brandlmayr says:

“In Polwechsel, the non-hierarchical world of free improvisation on the
one hand, and the far more predetermined hierarchical construction/idea
of composition on the opposite, is a everlasting problem. How a lot can the
composer decide? How a lot can the ensemble or components of the ensemble
oppose and contribute? In fact, I believe this is a matter in numerous
teams, however in my expertise in many of the teams, bands and ensembles
I used to be concerned in, in some way fastened working methods and social
constructions are developed over time. In Polwechsel, all that is continuously on the map and must be redefined with each piece we
develop. So we discover ourselves in the course of social and political
points.”