p.o.p.: music that gently challenges you, consistently and repeatedly

Title: IKEBANA

Label: FMR

It stands for Psychology of Perception and you might be forgiven that you are on the receiving end of a sonic experiment. This avant-garde exploration is a temporal challenge that explores response even more than perception.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The members of this collective includes Nora Krahl (violin and cello), Hannes Strobi (electric bass and electronics), Elena Kakaliagou (French horn) and Reinhold Friedl (piano).

In mastering terms, this sonic installation has a neutral and balanced presentation but the sonic constructions are anything but… This is music but melody takes a holiday or, at least, rises with a snoozy aspect, wanders and sways in drunken fashion and lies down quietly in a shop doorway, humming gently to itself.

Mostly, what you have here is observation, awareness and insight in solid form, roaming the soundstage and asking questions with a pen and clipboard. Tones and textures emanated from the collective, asking, “Do you understand? Hmm? Do you?” This is a musical excursion that gently challenges you, consistently and repeatedly.

So don’t look upon the musical instruments above and think that you’re going to get a quick Basin Street Blues or a pastiche of Mozart. There are no easily recognisable instrumental structures here. Each is played with imagination or malice aforethought or each has been treated before or after those ‘electronics’ have bitten into them.

This is music for the senses. Music to feel. Music that explores you just as much as you might want to explore it.

The only harmony that you will hear here is the same produced by the wind rushing through a lonely and abandoned security wire mesh fence, surrounding a long abandoned warehouse whose future and condition no-one really cares about. The instruments here don’t produce – they react.