" 'ANTIPHONA AD INTROITUM'! Finally on SUBSTANTIA we can present to you the highly regarded German masters of experimental dadaism & de-construction, whose releases are always a thoughtful play with hidden meanings, conceptions & contradictions: 'Learning to play. Disorder. Destruction of programmed Solutions. Learning to see.'
COLUMN ONE is a long existing collective of multimedia artists hailing from the Berlin-area with frequently changing members; their performance & artworks are as important as the music (see also their impressive website: www.column-one.de). On this mysterious 10" you will disocver two pieces that sound completely different: ANTIPHONA is a bewildering work of musique concrete, changing between very fast moving collages and quieter parts, always surprisingly fractured, using an amazing quantity of different sound-sources of all kinds. The second piece INTROITUM is a meditative overtone bowl-drone recorded at the legendary "Sibirische Zelle" in Berlin with three microphones in three different rooms, resulting in strange sound-effects and audio interactions. Both tracks can be regarded as anthiponies forming a single whole.
For us these are metaphors for the emergence of the "Irrational" and "Sacred" in the daily profane lives, using notions from religious scopes in a new context. Side A ends in an endless groove, the artwork comes from SEAN HILLEN, pressed on bleak vinyl in an edition of 500 copies." [label info]
www.substantia-innominata.de
"Following Illusion Of Safety's 'Sweet Dreams', Germany's Substantia Innominata (daughter of Drone), returns with another fine work of some the older garde of experimentalists, Column One from Berlin. They have been around for quite some time, and for them the presentation is equally important as the music, and there is always some sort of link with dada, even when it's quite well hidden, like on the b-side 'Antiphona' 10". Or the a-side, depends which one you play first. I started out with 'Introitum' in which a salad bowl is played. It's recorded with three microphones in three different rooms. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Peter Hollinger, who played the bowl, was walking around, as to catch the overtones in various ways. The location was a masonry, so there is quite some natural reverb. He plays it graciously and it makes up a wonderful simple but lovely piece of 'drone' like music. The title piece can be found on the other side of the record and shows the dada side of Column One. All of the members seem to donates 'sources' as well as Antoine Chessex playing saxophone and Robert Schalinski on zither, voice, gongs, saw, acoustic instruments and field recordings. The editing was done by by Jurgen Eckloff. This is a fine piece of instrumental passages by the duo of Schalinski and Chessex and taped media excerpts by the others. Set next to each other, rather being superimposed on each other. Its hard to say what this piece means, if anything at all. I'm sure it does however. It's perhaps not a piece one easily expects from this label, better known for music such as captured on the other side, but it's a daring out-of-the box movement of said label, and therefore needs our applause. And Column One? They just always surprise us." [FdW/Vital Weekly]