Pensieri Bianchi

by Thom JurekThis set of master percussionist Fritz Hauser's solo works was one part of an art exhibition. He performed the concert -- which was recorded in an ancient, all-white room in an Italian castle -- for the paintings of Raimund Girke, whose reported obsession with white became Hauser's obsession to disprove. He recorded in a white room to assert the notion that for him, the paintings and their "whiteness," with their white shading, was an overstatement of critics regarding form. Hauser's idea was that white became the base, both on canvas and sonically, for tonal colors and subtler shades of myriad colors that were developed in direct line with the ending of one color's boundary suggesting the next. It certainly feels like that here, as one rhythmic idea and its resultant tonal translation from the harmonics and acoustics in the room dictated not a response but an entirely new "color" or palette of form from which to work. That the entire disc flows in this manner suggests -- at least on a sonic level -- that his theory is correct. There is no need for repetition when what comes from the instruments -- or as he would suggest, from the paintings, is only similar in that they are percussion instruments played in a white room, or paintings created with a white-shaded backdrop. This recording is not like his masterpiece Trommel: A Radiophonic Work/Die Welle, but it is just as good. This is the hidden terrain on the underside of rhythm, the canvas upon which it creates itself: a room or physical space that can, if necessary, co-create by bringing back both immediacy and distance, and the instruments themselves. To call this disc painterly would be to misrepresent Hauser's intention, to call it an aural sculpture is far more accurate.