Kanding & Bretschneider – Contemporánea Electronic Works

Two men, two nationalities, one shared box of tools. That is the premise, and it turns out to be more interesting than it sounds on paper.

Frank Bretschneider comes out of the old East German electronic underground, the Dresden and Berlin circuits where synthesis was as much a political act as an aesthetic one. Ejnar Kanding arrives from Denmark’s more academically inflected new-music scene, a place where the ghost of Per Nørgård still walks the halls. Put them in a room together, tell them to remake each other’s material, and you get something that shouldn’t cohere but mostly does.

“A Different Kind of Tension” is the calling card here: six minutes of percussion samples, courtesy of David Hildebrandt, chopped and layered into something that grooves, actually grooves, in a way electronic composition of this pedigree usually disdains. I kept thinking of late Zappa, the “Jazz from Hell” period, crossed with Xenakis at his most granular and agitated. There’s a physical pleasure in it. Bodies could move to this, which is not a sentence I get to write often about music that comes trailing this much conceptual baggage.

Then comes the main event. Auxiliary Blue runs thirty-eight minutes across eleven continuous tracks, and it asks for a different kind of listening altogether. Patient. Almost devotional. The opening is a slow march, funereal in tempo but not in affect, and from there the piece opens into one mysterious tract after another. Repetition does the structural work that development would do in a symphonic argument; cells recur, mutate slightly, recur again, and the effect is ritualistic, closer to Górecki’s sense of sacred time-stretching than to anything in the club-music lineage Bretschneider emerged from. Instrumental sound and electronic processing trade places so fluidly that after a while you stop trying to locate the seam. A live instrument triggers a transformation, the transformation becomes the new material, and the ear simply follows.

The persistent clicking that runs through much of the piece wore on me a little by the twenty-minute mark. It functions almost like surface noise on a vinyl pressing, a needle-in-the-groove artifact deliberately retained, and whether you hear it as atmosphere or as itch will depend on your tolerance for that particular kind of sonic patina. Boris Blank uses similar textures more sparingly, and I missed that restraint here. But the piece as a whole is remarkably transparent in its layering. You can hear where each strand sits in the mix; nothing congeals into mud. And there is, unexpectedly, wit in it. A gesture will land somewhere just slightly absurd, a low thud arriving a beat later than logic demands, and you wonder whether that’s the composers smiling or just me hearing things. Either way, the piece never once goes slack across its considerable length.

“Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms” closes the disc and returns to that clicking pulse, more insistently this time, functioning almost like a metronome under enigmatic, half-mechanical sonorities. These turn out to be orchestral fragments drawn from Kanding’s own Vergeuder der Schmerzen (“Squanderer of Pains”), so thoroughly processed that only occasional flashes of the original’s melancholy survive, like a face glimpsed through frosted glass. It’s an odd, haunting way to end: a piece built from the wreckage of another piece, mourning something it can no longer quite name.

Contemporánea’s engineering deserves credit: detailed, unfatiguing, with real depth of field even at high volume, which matters enormously in music this dependent on layering. There isn’t an obvious rival release to measure this against. The repertoire is too specialized, too much the product of this specific collaboration, to have accumulated competing versions. That is, in its way, the strongest recommendation I can offer. Nobody else is doing quite this. Recommended, with the caveat that you’ll want to give Auxiliary Blue the full, undistracted thirty-eight minutes it demands. Anything less shortchanges it.