Ernesto Rodrigues, Christine Abdelnour & Axel Dörner

Ernesto Rodrigues, Christine Abdelnour & Axel Dörner - Nie (review)

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This is a very aesthetically pure record. One could say that they choose to play by a set of guiding principles. They favour pitchless sounds, block-shaped phrases, a close relation to silence and a type of interaction which avoids “call and response”. This choice to reduce could both be seen as a drawback, because it lacks expressivity (some might say) and humour, but it could also be seen as a benefit because the accumulation of all the aesthetically clean actions create a special universe that would otherwise not be possible.

Listening to this record puts you in a special state of mind. It’s a cleansing experience. It’s almost like going through a kind of meditation, but which goes into various degrees of intensity. You become aware of the everyday life-feeling. The musicians are expressing that reality. The un-suspenseful but beautiful feeling of a silence. The beauty in different white noises. The very slow moving rhythm of things changing. Then at times, things intensify and can become even a little bit uncomfortable, with very loud and high pitches. The densification and diffusion becomes of central importance in this music. This gives the listener something that keeps the focus up. Another very important aspect which enriches this music is the variation of phrase lengths, and the varying placement of phrases between the musicians, which makes the interaction dynamic. In the end, the restrictive aspects don’t seem restrictive at all, but become a playground where the musicians can play freely. The listener is left with the feeling of having been told a story, and of having heard something very musically motivated (as opposed to intellectually motivated).

As far as I could research, this is the only published meeting between Dörner and Abdelnour, which makes it a very important record. They fit each other like hand and glove. Rodrigues fits perfectly too. As much as I love to listen to collaborations with more contrasting styles, I found this record to be such a nice relief. To listen to something which is so clean and in one sense simple (although it is very complex). Simple isn’t easy…

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