Grischa Lichtenberger has become a favorite of mine over the last several years. As the label releasing this work may indicate, his music is electronic, and of a refined and mostly software-based nature. Much of his work is aggressively digital, overloaded with glitching, abrupt cuts, hard and dry digital surfaces... as with many other recordings published by Raster-Noton. There is overlap with some of Autechre‘s aggressiveness and inventiveness, but a different approach is employed.
There is a clinical digital-ness to a lot of Raster-Noton‘s releases that I absolutely love. Not all of the releases go so hard into this air-tight laptop-crafted aesthetic; there are some earthier -yet still quite digital-textures entertained in many works that is equal in high style and impact. The label’s other releases include recordings by luminaries Frank Bretschneider, Atom, Kanding Ray, Vladislav Delay, Dasha Rush and Byetone, all of whom present interestingly unique takes on modern electronic music for both immersive listening and the dance floor.
Works for Last Work falls in the former category, which is a bit unusual for this artist. Lichtenberger’s music tends to have hard beats or at least some kind of driving rhythmic intensity, but this is a flowing, gentle set of pieces. The album is a gathering of works composed for and utilized in a dance piece by Batsheva Dance Company and choreographer Ohad Naharin. The album also includes some sketches produced during the project which were apparently not used in the performance.
This is introspective music lacking any rhythms but heavy in beautiful textures and tonalities. In Lichtenberger’s other work there is a strong and poetic sense of intentional tonality and melody, though it is usually fragmented and dissected into asymmetrical forms. Overall his compositions are elegantly abstract; there are narrative arcs where the listener is led along an emotional path which escalates and morphs as it proceeds, always surprising and often loaded with ups and downs. This quality is subtly present in this much slower, quieter, gentler and tenderly emotional collection. These pieces are cinematic, sensitive, vulnerable, and also share an intelligence of analysis and prudence… hard to describe, but there is a feeling of determination in these pieces. It probably comes from the tightness of the editing and the strong spatial features in the soundscapes.
There is something striking about the spatial aural quality of Lichtenberger’s work. Through reverbs, stereo maneuvers and frequency engineering he produces some very stimulating artificial spatial sensations. This is more prevalent in his other albums such as Kamilhan; il y a peril en la demeure or Spielraum | Allgegenwart | Stralung, but still present in this album. His tight, strongly defined set of sensibilities shows through the differences between tracks, their relative brevity, the prevalence of silence and open space, and close-to-the-listener sounds having sometimes asmr-like intimacy.
Throughout the album it seems he often uses recordings of guitars, zither or piano as a sound source, then dissects, manipulates, constructs loops and melodic assemblages from those recordings. Track 5 ‘0315_11_bat_shost_1_bt’ has what sounds like a cello, violin and guitar as central tonal-melodic voices. Some or all of this could be synthetic, but it sounds real. In these times you never know what’s real.
Track 6’s main instrument sounds like a zither, with the second instrument seeming to be an electric guitar. Two zither strums looped are the backdrop for high-fretboard hammer-ons and string scraping from an electric guitar. Just this and silence. Short, sweet, elegantly abstract.
Track 7, ‘0315_23_dancers voices_mel_1_re eq’, is the only piece with a more unsettling, alien, atonal electronic drone flavor among what is a pretty emotional, poetically austere set of tonal journeys. This piece has an uncomfortable slow-motion siren-like academic electronic wailing as its main feature. Grandma will not enjoy this one.
I won’t blather on about the rest of it track by track. I encourage taking a listen.
This album is analytical ambient music, but without any soullessness. There is so much patience, space and time built into these pieces that a strong sense of emotional attunement comes through. It has a universal appeal that is approachable and evocative. It’s an interesting entry point into Grischa Lichtenberger, as it highlights melodic and tonal sensibilities that are present but not so obvious in his other recordings.
The album is only released as digital, but there is the option to purchase a set of prints by the artist along with the downloaded audio. Cost for this is €100.85 ($109.52) likely plus shipping. The download only is €10.
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