Imagine yourself the following conversation between a musician and his partner:
Musician: Hi dear, I made a new piece of music, do you want to hear it?
Partner: Ohh yes please, I would love to hear it. Play it for me.
Musician walks to the cd player and puts in the cd with his new piece of music and presses play.
Five minutes later the Partners asks the Musician when the music will start.
Musician: The music is already playing for 5 minutes.
Partner: But I hear nothing.
Musician: Yes, good isn’t it? It’s really really quiet music.
Partner: Ok, but why won’t I hear a bit of it?
Musician: well that is the idea, but let me turn up the volume.
The musician walks to the amplifier and cranks up the volume to the maximum.
Partner: Ohh, nice, now I hear the music. You used field recordings from our garden and from our last walk through the forest. Lovely.
Musician: yes, isn’t that great?
Partner: Yes it is, but I don’t see why it should be so quiet.
Musician: That’s the whole concept of this music.
Partner: Ok? But wouldn’t some dynamics have been nice to attract the listener some more in the music?
Musician: Dynamics? Of course not, this is meant to be quiet so people really concentrate on the sound.
Partner: I see…
After 10 minutes to music is over and the musician turns down the volume again and puts on some other music.
Musician: So what did you think?
Partner: I don’t get why it should be this low volume music. It’s not like it’s 4:33 by John Cage, because you actually used recordings.
Musician: Well, let me explain…
And so on and so on.
Repeat this story twice and make of the musicians Luigi Turra, who is one of the main people behind the label Koyuki and Fourm (B.G. Nichols) who is the main man behind White_line, and you get the 3” EP Meditation Space.
It’s a nice short recording, which is way too quiet for normal listening habits, especially if you live in middle of a city. It could have used more dynamics which would make the listener interact much more with the pieces. The concept of silence is nice, but is slightly overdone here. Both musicians have done more interesting things already. |
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