What kind of sonic torture could anyone possibly contrive with only flutes at their disposal? As Peter Ablinger ably demonstrates, with a little ingenuity and a lot of flutes, a vast array of possibilities exist.
‘Hypotheses uber deas Mondlight’ is like some kind of nightmare as atonal whistles pipe across off-key notes that beds and flight into the air like mistrals or delirious birds, and dropping like falls of snow. At least that’s how it sounds, although according to the liner notes, it’s ‘a micro-rhythmic / micro-tonal proportion canin created out of the single, ascending eighth-tone scale over the range of a flute.’ What it translates as is the sounds of 16 flutes playing across one another, neither in time nor in key with one another. Such disharmony and arrhythmia is most disconcerting, and over the course of 21 minutes the effect is cumulative.
Of the remaining tracks, ‘SS. Giovanni e Paolo’ is conspicuously brief with a running time of just five minutes, in contrast to the others which flip and flop and bubble and breeze on past 20 minutes. Its sonorous droning hums – created by between one and three wind instruments with glissando slides to create drawn-out glissandi in parallel with the dust cleaners in operation in the church where the piece was recorded at the time – penetrate the psyche in an altogether different way.
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‘Ohne Titel / 3 Flöten’ features 3 flutes playing 18 one-minute pieces. With the flutes each being differently tempered – 2 with extensions added – the effect is akin to a school music lesson in which the children are learning to play ‘3 Blind Mice’. It’s not exactly comfortable listening.
The fourth and final tracj, ‘Moirestudie fur Chiyoko Szlavnics’ is a composition for 22 ‘equal voices or instruments’ (namely flutes) ‘with the possibility of continuous glissando.’ That possibility is realised over the course of some 21 and a half minutes, to brain-bending effect.
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