By Eyal Hareuveni

The late Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo stated as soon as that “most trumpet
gamers suppose that the trumpet is a musical instrument to make sound
with respiration, however I discovered it’s a musical instrument to make sounds to
categorical Respiration”. Austrian trumpeter Franz Hautzinger has an identical
philosophy and has used the title Gomberg as an alter ego and a software for
him to “overcome his personal limitations” as a trumpeter. Hauzinger started
his Gomberg recordings with the milestone Gomberg (Quartertone-Trumpet
Solo) (GROB, 2000) and Gomberg II >>Profile<< (Loewenhertz,
2007).

Gomberg III-V collects recordings from 2008 to 2018, in Vienna,
Hautzinger’s hometown, and his present dwelling in Brest in north-western
France. The 22 miniature items are commissioned works, created for
distinct artwork areas or site-related works, works for movies and theatre,
efficiency artists, writers and poets and a few are musical diary notes,
or, as Hautzinger calls them, references”to the breath of the souls”.
Hautzinger sees his solo work and particularly Gomberg III-V as a “level
of reflection: it might probably awaken a sense that one didn’t know existed
way back”.

Hautzinger performs on the quartertone trumpet, augmented with digital
results, zither, his voice and percussion. Gomberg III-V is a monumental
catalog of Hauztzinger’s explorative and idiosyncratic language – a
extremely private vocabulary and syntax, expressed with an array of
prolonged respiration strategies – that reimagines and infrequently transforms the
trumpet into an alien sonic entity. His minimalist but exact, nearly
otherworldly digital sounds borrow the syntax of reductionist
digital music.

Fellow Austrian guitarist Burkhard Stangl, who wrote the liner notes and
collaborated earlier than with Hautzinger, describes Hautzinger as a sonic
shaman and a trickster who at all times crosses sonic borders, radically
carefree of on a regular basis rationality, and a musician who evokes archaic
reminiscences from a time when there was not but a distinction between the
divine and the non-divine. And, certainly, Hautzinger is a fearless grasp
of sculpting enigmatic ambient and hyper-orchestral soundscapes, with
whole command of results, together with noises, processed and fragmented
poetic voices and delicate, futurist dance beats. These miniature items
change into extra financial and austere in time however preserve a uncommon, elusive
high quality. A bit like “Anna Politkowskaja”, titled after the Russian
journalist and human rights activist who was murdered in 2006, is one
essentially the most stunning and unsettling items right here.

Stangl asserts that Hauzinger marks the top of one other Viennese musical
college and the founding of its new one. Clearly, Gomberg III-V is a
radically singular work and some of the spectacular trumpet albums of
our occasions.