Album: Ordeel
Artist: Asmus Tietchens & Frans de Waard
Label: Aufabwegen
Catalogue no: A117
Tracklist:
1. Ordeel
I
2. Ordeel
II
3. Ordeel
III
4. Ordeel
IV
5. Ordeel
V
6. Ordeel
VI
7. Ordeel
VII
8. Ordeel
VIII
9. Ordeel
IX
10. Ordeel
X
11. Ordeel
XI
The names of both Asmus
Tietchens and Frans de Waard should be familiar to anyone who follows the
streams of electronic, avant-garde, and experimental music – Tietchens as a
musician who’s been releasing material since 1975 with his first solo album
coming out in 1980, and who is still adventuring into diffuse and abstract
realms up to the present. Frans de Waard is the driving force behind the Korm
Plastics label, has worked for Staalplaat, and since 2003 has run the Vital
Weekly online magazine. Ordeel is the
first album they’ve worked on together, born out of a mutual respect for each
other’s work. On paper then, this sounds like a match made in avant-garde
paradise, so what have they have managed to concoct together?
This is an album that one
doesn’t listen to lightly – Tietchens in particular crafts complex explorations
in sound that span genres, creating pieces that incorporate the familiar given
twists to make them appear alien. This offering is no exception, incorporating
as it does everything from soft breathings and whispers to glitchy spasms and
groans, from the fragile and insubstantial to the hard and diamond-like. Every
one of these compositions feels like a signal from some long-lost civilisation
received via some old equipment in the small hours of the morning, or messages
from out of the spaces between dimensions or even from the angles between the
divisions of time. The music is wrapped in an unsolvable mystery, the
individual pieces pointing to some greater inscrutability that will resist any
attempt at decoding.
These alien signals
sometimes harmonise naturally, others cross paths and cross-pollinate to create
hybrids, while others stand strong on their own. It can be seen as a kind of virtual
bestiary of exotic phantasmal creatures, entities whose forms and morphologies
turn our conceptions upside down – some cocking a snoot at our understanding of
logic, some inventing ephemeral chimera that diverge from accepted wisdom, while
others produce hybrids that dazzle and enchant. All the while Tietchens and de
Waard are mapping out potentialities and possibilities, delineating the phantastique and super-real, in the
process of which they’re presenting us with a completely new zoology and geography. It is at once startling,
beguiling, amusing, bewildering, confusing, delightful, and alarming. These
unknown worlds and beasts (for such they are) are drawn in a spectrum of hues
as wide as the universe, depicted in colours for which we have no names yet.
Contained within this album is the whole panoply of alternative Creations,
propagated from Big Bangs that could have been, may have been, have been, and
might still be.
The inventiveness on
display here is testament to the enduring vision of the two artists concerned, with
that unique vision inhabiting a liminality that we mere mortals aren’t privy
to. In other words, Tietchens and de Waard are interpreters and translators,
taking alien signals and decoding their genetics, recombining the data into
comprehensible formats. Ordeel is not
for cursory listening: it demands you get involved and participate, demands you
imbibe and savour deeply, and furthermore, asks that you absorb and understand.
To put it another way, it enjoins you to comprehend the meaning and immensity
of the worlds they’re exploring and mapping for us armchair travellers. Listen,
and understand.
Psymon Marshall 2019.
