Nowhere Street

Last September cellist Anil Eraslan and clarinetist Michael Thieke set up some recording gear in the Golgatha-Kirche in Mitte and played a concert without an audience. Nearly a year later a recording of that unheard performance was released as Weaving Waves (scatterArchive), its fourteen pieces in the same sequence they were played. The church proved to be a good vessel for the improvised sounds they produced together, with a series of fragile, airy meditations consistently unfurling at the edge of tonality. While Thieke has long been a crucial exponent of the sort of hushed aesthetic of Berlin’s echtzeitmusik community he’s never shied away from his ardor for jazz. For example, in Der lange Schatten, his ongoing project with pianist Håvard Wiik and double bassist Antonio Borghini, his appreciation for the great Jimmy Giuffre is palpable. On the other hand, Eraslan, a budding filmmaker who recently made Sound Dreams of Istanbul, a documentary about the improvised music scene in his Turkish homeland, has been more closely connected with jazz, especially through his crucial membership in Borghini’s superb sextet Banquet of Consequences. But both musicians seem to have a magical feeling for sound in its most delicate manifestation, and it’s this nexus they explore on Weaving Waves.
Thieke toggles between the gentlest articulations of pure tone, unpitched, gestural breaths, and almost misty upper register cries, taming a notoriously cranky instrument to maintain a sotto voce elegance. It’s Eraslan that generally serves up any sharpness, quietly unleashing upper register harmonics that actually cut through the clarinet. His striated bowed lines function as a kind of sonic prism, each feather stroke motion a microscopic splintering and coalescing of tone. Yet despite the rigor and control over their individual instruments, the pleasure comes in how they combine their lines. I don’t know how many breaks they took between playing each piece, or how long they lasted, but most of the recording seems to flow organically from one track to the next, suggesting the album captures a more-or-less real time negotiation. There was no goal other than exploring how their sounds could mesh and dance within this sacred space. (If you read all of the lowercase titles in a row you get, “we have nothing to play and we are playing it and that is music,” which gets to that essence pretty clearly). You can occasionally hear that practice play out in a single piece, especially on a longer selection like “we,” below.
Peter Margasak