After a decade making music together, Nabelóse – the collaboration between an Austrian pianist (Ingrid Schmoliner) and a Greek-German French horn player (Elena Kakaliagou) is no easier to pigeonhole than when their self-titled debut album came out in 2017. Properly timeless, much of their work has an unclassifiable, sometimes astringent beauty that could equally be the solemn keening of some ancient funeral rite or the side project of an experimental drone artist. Haar is the duo’s third album. In some ways, it’s a slight departure from the first two, but it’s also an even stranger, more idiosyncratic and more impressive work.
Nabelóse songs are rarely just piano, French horn and two voices. However, these elements are at the heart of almost everything they do, used in imaginative and not always easily identifiable ways. Haar consists of five tracks, three relatively short—under six minutes—and two that are just under thirteen minutes each. On their previous releases, Nabelóse and 2020’s Omokentro, the duo established a certain sound; their music is almost always tonal/textural rather than melodic, and it often has a stately, gliding quality, especially when Kakaliagou’s French horn is in the foreground. The opening of Haar could hardly be further from that. “Niriides” evokes the sea goddesses usually anglicized as ‘Nereides’ from Homer’s Iliad. Though it presumably began with the piano, the music—not quite a tune—is a looped cluster of Steve Reich-like sound. Blending bell-like and more organic tones, it’s a reiterated jumble more rhythmic than melodic, but not straightforwardly so. The tempo is disturbingly unstable, brilliantly mimicking the motion of the sea by speeding up and slowing down, not dramatically but perceptibly throughout the piece. Over this strangely patterned sound, something like an amplified music box, Kakaliagou recites Homer’s verses in her warm, calm voice. A strange, sunny piece of music, it’s too restless to be soothing, but still vital and somehow benign.
Just as much of a departure, “Blue Mountains”—another of the shorter pieces—is one of two tracks based on Greek folk songs, but it hardly feels like a song at all. It’s recited, almost chanted, in a voice that’s distorted by Kakaliagou speaking through her horn. That metallic tone is reflected in the music, which is a kind of minimalist junkyard rhythm, with no recognizable instrumental tones. It’s restless and unsettling—almost industrial. Though it’s not exactly harsh, it’s probably the most abrasive Nabelóse song to date. The other song is at the other end of the spectrum. You’re unlikely to hear a more beautiful song this year than the twelve-minute, 45-second “Perfume.” It’s adapted a folk song from the isle of Leros and is far more like some of the earlier Nabelóse music. Sparse deep piano notes and wind-like sounds made by breathing through the horn establish a bleakly beautiful atmosphere against which Kakaliagou sings, her voice almost tangibly fragile and vulnerable. She plays the horn conventionally too, with long, mournful notes sustained against the skeletal piano and ghostly rustlings with almost percussive noises adding detail to the spaces. It’s a stunning, hypnotic piece of music.
Voices—both Kakaliagou and Schmoliner’s this time—are central to “Hinter meinen Dünen” (Behind My Sands Of Time), the last of the shorter compositions. It’s a kind of harmonious sound collage in which poetry is recited in German and Greek by several voices at once. There are whispers, softly spoken tones and strangely disembodied and distant ones—all speaking over a somber but not sinister background. It’s the closest the album gets to a standard drone record, and the album’s slightest composition. Still, it’s beguiling and sonically very pleasant nonetheless.
The closing “To Ke” is a 12-minute, 47-second tour-de-force suggesting an archaic funeral song. It opens a little like “Tauchen” from Omokentro, though in a gentler, less imposing way, with Kakaliagou’s horn sounding like a forlorn foghorn drifting through mist before Ingrid Schmoliner’s beautiful voice joins it. Schmoliner sings lyrics written in an imaginary language, vocally mimicking the long notes of the horn. The track features guest percussionist Els Vandeweyer, who accompanies the song’s soft droning texture with dry, spectral rattlings and occasional xylophone-like sounds. For music that’s composed from so few components, the sound is surprisingly vast and deep, rich with a sense of mystery. A spellbinding performance, not without a certain tempo, the song expresses a feeling of time suspended before fading into a charged and glowing silence.
Overall, Haar isn’t a huge departure from Nabelóse or Omokentro. However, it has its own mysterious spirit and inner logic. In its individual tracks, especially the shorter ones, it feels in some ways fragmentary and definitely elusive, even opaque. Still, it lingers in the mind long after more concise and apparently complete songs have faded away.
|
Summary |
|
