Gamma-Menge

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For over 35 years, Asmus Tietchens has been creating avant-garde music. Originally fascinated with tape compositional works, his move to digital electronics bares many similar approaches to his earlier works. Tietchens says of this record 'My music is composed of aesthetic and extraordinary events which make statements for themselves, but there is absolutely no message. For myself the music most definitely has a meaning. I am an adventurer in the studio.....my aim is to discover the white dots on the landscape of sound, territories where no others have traveled.' So, with piercing spectrally altered sounds, Asmus Tietchens' welcomes you into his realm of processed audio called Gamma-Menge. It's an unusual realm to wonder through. Just as you get a sense of one of the audio environments he creates, the tables are turned and you're introduced to something unfamiliar. Even within each of the pieces on this album, Tietchens jumps, even if subtly between layers and textures. 'Teilmenge 18' for instance clunks along, set to a soft undertone before coolly erupting in the middle of the piece with a buried sound of feedback and distortion. It's hard to know what to make of this record. As a listening experience, it's rewarding in that each of the piece on this record appears to explore a similar pathway, through some unknown world of sound objects and other mutant sonic fragments. It's beautifully unusual sounding, welcoming and in the same moment foreign and unfamiliar.