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CD Feature/ Gabriel Paiuk & Jason Kahn: "Breathings"

  Tobias

Jason Kahn is one of the few artists, whose press releases I actually read before enjoying their CDs. To the point, evocative and with a lot of interesting details on the background and history of the recording, they always set the perfect mood for the actual listening experience. For “Breathings”, however, the text is short, the tone sober and the information scant. We learn that the album was recorded in Buenos Aires two years ago at the home of Gabriel Paiuk, an improvisational artist from the border at which concrete electronic sounds and acoustic phenomena meet. The rest is left to the imagination of the observer.

Well, almost all of it. For Kahn does leave us with a quote by Paiuk as to the origin of the album’s title: “I felt many times that the whole disc created a feeling of continuity in which each piece seemed to me like an extended “breathing”, each piece as one single breath. Even a feeling of something in which one experiences the music through breathing.” And somehow, this does sum up nicely what the music sounds like. “Breathing” consists of nine compact, extremely focussed and highly individual scenes of at most six minutes’ lenght, separated by short moments of silence, but flowing in- and out of each other as thought they were interconnected acts of a single, larger entity. Each time the music exhales, a vivid aural scetch dies down, each time it inhales, it is reborn into a new and different existence, with a fresh persona which however still contains polaroid traces of its preceeding life within its neural circuit. There is a clear responsability assignment within the duo: Gabriel carefully feels his way forward from behind his piano, delivering atonal clusters, short expressionist sequences, single notes as well as plucking the strings directly with his bare hands (he then occasionally creates the impression of a handyman groping for screws inside a toolbox). There seems to have been no post-production when it comes to the sound of the piano, its well-doesed reverb stemming excluively from the use of the sustain pedal, which lends Paiuk’s playing a very organic and up-front touch. Jason, meanwhile, uses his PC to place these piano utterings in an environment and an open context: Ultra-high frequencies, roaring semblances, fluid drones, rippled pulsations and hissing, generator hums, muffled and distant drum ruffles make for an unfamilar, yet never intimidating ambiance of extremely precise accents. The main reason for this feeling of security is the fact that one keeps seeing the picture of two musicians interacting in the same room, exchanging information through looks and hormones, instead of data sent by email.

It would indeed be a waste of time trying to put the result in too many words. The power of this music lies exactly in what it avoids to express “expressis verbis”, not in what it actually says out loud. Filing it under electro-acoustic chamber-musical minimal-theatre would therefore not be entirely out of place. But merely calling it “Breathings” and leaving the rest to the imagination of the observer will do even better.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Cut Recordings
Homepage: Jason Kahn