We have heard from this duo before on a few CDs, one of which was released by Wergo too, containing works by John Cage. Otherwise these brilliant musicians and composers are mostly heard on obscure, small labels, which, nonetheless, in these days of cyber communication are readily available on the Internet, praise be.

Both artists have also issued a number of exciting discs as solo artists.

It is certainly exemplary of Wergo to take these two enfant terribles on board, because they deserve more than just a causal glance. These are in fact two of the most important musical contemporaries that we find in modern music, ingenious and creative to the core; always with a new way of hearing and playing, always taking our listening a little further into new soundscapes – and never, for the slightest moment, playing it safe or dull.

This time around they look to Christian Wolff for the musical material.

The ten pieces For 1, 2 or 3 People for any instrument (1964) are distributed in three sections across this CD, interspersed by the other three works; Exercise 27, Bread and Roses and Edges.
A shallow glance at For 1, 2 or 3 People may render a false picture of a very simple composition. However, as you study the performance instructions, you soon find out that it’s a delicate composition.
Christian Wolff says about the work that “this music is drawn from the interaction of the people playing it”. This comment may also at first point to an elusive simplicity, but, as the booklet text by Peter Niklas Wilson goes:

Even though the 10 different versions of For 1, 2 or 3 People for any instrument are distributed through three different sections across the CD, I will go through them all in sequence here, dealing with the other pieces afterwards. 8 of the versions are performed here with two people, which would be the natural choice for a duo! – but one version is performed as a solo violin piece, and another one as a solo percussion work.

Track 1, version 1 [violin and percussion].
A soft strike on metal, withheld, thoughtful, is joined by a soaring violin that holds its breath for a long while, as a second, even softer percussive touch adds another floating layer of glowing dust. A forceful blow that resounds majestically takes you out of the hypnosis, and a brutal down-force on the violin bow produces eerie door hinge sounds that penetrate the environment with lustfilled pain and wry indigestion…
Smalltalk up in the violin pitches flutter like nervous goldcrests in the maze of spruce needles, while a peculiar, soft-droning percussion potion is bathing soar sections on the fly.
One thing that Matthias Kaul has taught me is that percussion instruments can be used not only for rhythmic attacks and various patterns, but also as well for achieving drones and meditative atmospheres off all kinds, simply depending on the way you choose to touch the instruments, their surfaces or rims. That is why – in this particular section, Malcolm Goldstein’s violin may seem more of an aggressive instrument and the percussion more of a restrained, chordal, modal type of sound producer.
The combinations of sounds that build the swell of this music are too numerous to mention, but the listening has a hard time keeping up with the sound events that are born and which die away, in this suspended bardo of elusive echoes of sonic gestures – and as a backdrop or base for all this you can sense the bare and naked concentration of the players, who apply their skill and creativity with the light touch of resolve, in relaxed determination.

Track 2, version 2 [voice and hurdy-gurdy].
A swaggering vowel reaches forth, while the hurdy-gurdy whispers along, in a time frame of gray-spun sugar. The vocalisms go from dog-like moans to human traces of discord and despair, to child-like introversions of play and sand pile meditations. The hurdy-gurdy spins threads of time that it ties around and around the voice, which rises through the time spaces like a swaying rattlesnake out of a basket in Agra.

Track 3, version 3 [violin and percussion]
Intense fiddling, intense grinding – and then a sudden halt, out of which a muffled low sound slowly rises, only to stop just as suddenly. The violin grinds and squeaks, turning in slow gestures around itself, until reaching a scribbling note that it feels comfortable with for a while. Kaul breaks in with a thunderous bass drum attack, which is followed by yet a couple of grave statements. Goldstein ducks under this might, pulling long elastic bands of overtones out of his fiddle, while Kaul looks through his bag for ever more indigestive percussive utterances, some of which shine like jewels, others that stick to the walls of your auditory meatus like wet leaves on rubber boots.

Track 5, version 4 [violin solo].
When played just by one performer, many of the serious hazards with this piece, concerning the interactions with other performers, fall away, leaving a skeleton of sorts to work with, score wise.
Goldstein carefully and gently drags his bow across the strings, much like dragging a rake across a fall lawn, curious about what might turn up. Goldstein does not, though, restrain himself completely to this fiddle raking procedure, because he can’t help but letting on some vocalisms too.
The feeling of raking gives way to a feeling of a larva spinning a cocoon out in the silence of the dead dark of a forest, in secrecy, on southern latitudes where even summer nights can be dark. I feel insect instincts come crawling up my arms as I listen on into this Goldsteinean Wolff rendition. I sense the outline of my body as an empty contour against the bleak light of the horizon, and I wonder where my density went, where my mature gravitational pull ever vanished, as the violinist scribbling of indecipherable signs go on inside my empty outline, completely filling it with messages that remain to be interpreted…

Track 6, version 5 [violin and hurdy-gurdy].
It’s almost Webern in the beginning, believe you me! That is not to last, because even if the transparence of Webern is somewhat retained along the line, a slightly and then heavily out-of-whack shadow play is set in motion, luring your hearing into ambiguity and borderline atmospheres.
The fiddle is treated harshly by its master there for a while, but gentler scenarios are demonstrated by the players, who let hurdy-gurdy and violin rub shoulders and creak rural doors in forgotten potato cellars, ever so gently.
As the duration is unfolding, Goldstein and Kaul spread a carpet of corrugated iron, which they seem to scratch with pointed iron-bar levers amongst the heaps of dirty potatoes, and sound is fleeing in all directions.

Track 7, version 6 [percussion solo].
With a buzzing as of an electric little fan, plastic wings hitting some kind of murky post modern surface, this adventure gets going, releasing itself into a sudden attack which balances on into an array of cuts, screeches, swelling metal clouds, rattling back alley garbage can lids and stray cat noises, wobbling congestions of cramped audio and soaring horizons of alien planets – all in the hands and imagination of Matthias Kaul and his Christian Wolff concept. A duckling and a staggering motion along a brick wall of Easton, Bristol – and we’re at the Trinity Bonfire celebrations, mad circling lights, shadowy figures drinking cider, with the dubious prospect of a trek by highways and behind derelict tenement buildings towards a place called the mount, from where you’re supposed to see all the fireworks of Bristol Bonfire night…
Matthias Kaul’s sense of sound making is an everlasting challenge for anyone to experience. I come with hard earned ears, but he still surprises me, this drummer villain!

Track 8, version 7 [voice and body duo].
Jolly outcries, or martial calls, which knows, easing into guttural oral cavity outlets, Henri Chopin-like in their saliva dripping exuberances, leaving wet traces all over the gravitational fields. Malcolm left his violin and Matthias his percussion set up, and here they go a sound-poeting and street juggling, down the route of impressions of this rotating disc in silver light. It’s no less mad than some of Antonin Artaud’s or Francois Dufrene’s most annoying spurs of exclamatory expressions…

Track 10, version 8 [violin and percussion].
Lines and dots, sheets and a rock for a pillow, bamboo serenities, invocations biding their time in a circling moment, a gnawing beaver event by Lake Saimaa – and the clicks and hums of guesswork… Yes, Goldstein and Kaul press on into the outer edges of reality, slowly expanding the possibilities of their instruments into realms that are as much philosophical as they are musical, as much downright illness as hypochondria – and we like it!
Fragile violin lines and pearl beads of glass percussion soothe the day for any lonesome soul, and since I’m withering away for the loss of an arborist named Zoë that went towards New Zealand, I tie this sparkling music around my solitude and cry wells of darkness into this persistent light of mind that keeps me painfully awake, and everything I look at hurts…

Track 11, version 9 [violin and percussion].
The violin: a cat’s entrance, a watchful gaze from the floor, as you lie on the bed on a free day, letting time seep through the weight of your body as your mind soars in relative piece.
As this violin-percussion episode unfolds, it proves to be one of the most musically beautiful pieces on the CD. All works are intriguing, ear-catching, eccentric – and at times wonderfully indigestive -, but this version 9 of For 1, 2 or 3 People for any instrument is musically beautiful down to the least detail; percussion tapping your forehead, violin circling the periphery of your ears, the combinations of sounds rising in a wondrous fragrance, like incense around you.
The piece is fastidious, thin, sparse – transparent… with the attentiveness of a cat.

Track 12, version 10 [violin and percussion].
This last version of this amply furnished suite of 10 versions of For 1, 2 or 3 People for any instrument, opens with a scratchy, lightly scraping vocalism, though it’s supposed to involve only violin and percussion, but this may be within score limits, since I’ve seen it happen at some other places in this endeavor too.
The vocal glissando ends in a clawing violin utterance, which in turn opens the percussion in a springy bounce. The violin talks about downward moods, as the percussion comes down hard and dark, silencing everything until the violin dares raise its thin voice.
There are many little pauses or silences in between sounding events in here, and the piece gives the impression of a revolving disc of sorts that is, for the most part, even and smooth, but which – here and there – is littered (or equipped) with obtrusive unevennesses that cause the sound to turn harsh and sudden as the needle of life moves through the dharma groove, encountering hardships between the soft-spoken periods…
The slowing rhythmic pattern of a door that opens on rusty hinges moves from the violin (in a perfect mimicry of Pierre Henry’s Variations for a Door and a Sigh) over to the percussion, which diligently picks up the hinge-pattern and evolves it into a hollow echo of jungle-land properties.
Towards the end, sharper and more direct words are spoken through edgy violin cuts and sudden, metallic percussion statements, but it never gets crowded. Statements are made with a certain spaciousness, apart from each other, allowing lots of air and a good view – and you have time to think.

After having observed the whole sequence of these 10 versions of For 1, 2 or 3 People for any instrument (1964) one can’t but marvel at the ingenuity with which Malcolm Goldstein and Matthias Kaul have set out to interpret Christian Wolff’s score, and I’ve been told that Wolff has been very satisfied with these particular renditions of his work.

Let’s look at the three remaining pieces:

Track 4; Exercise 27; Snare Drum Peace March 2 [snare drum] (1988).
With this work – which is part of a series of compositions called Peace Marches - we’re clearly in the realm where Wolff makes some kind of political statement, and in this case it has to do with militarism contra pacifism. It is daring to use an instrument like the snare drum, with its military associations, to deconstruct, as it were, militarism, take it apart and move towards peace.
Wolff has written a snare drum score that engages three different polyrhythmic layers, perhaps reaching – as Peter Niklas Wilson writes in the booklet – “an antimilitarism of the senses”.
As Kaul’s rendition commences, it comes across in sparse utterances of the bland sort, but soon, very soon, the bland strikes are joined and overshadowed by numerous ways of letting the snare drum talk, by touching it in ever so many ways – and Kaul whistles too!
I’m pretty sure a snare drum has never expressed itself as richly as here, under the guidance of Matthias Kaul, because if I hadn’t had it pointed out to me, I would never have thought that all these sounds (except for the occasional whistling, the blowing of air at the end and so forth) emanated from such a simple old military servant as the snare drum… Again Kaul surprises me! This snare drum growls and whispers, oozes and boils, rattles and squeals, sings in thin metallic voices and mumbles with the inwardness of old forlorn men.

Track 9; Bread and Roses for violin solo [violin] (1976).
Also this piece has its political semantics. It originates in – and, to begin with, Wolff’s violin solo cites it undistorted – the song Bread and Roses by Carol Kohlsaat, who wrote it for a mill strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912. Wolff then, however, fragments, manipulates and reassembles the piece in his own pondering of it.
The author of the rich booklet text – Peter Niklas Wilson – describes it thus:

In my vulnerable mood, reconstructing myself after the tormenting experience of saying goodbye to someone that I’d rather spend my life with, but who had to go to Tibet, Vietnam and then New Zealand – for good… - this tender melody from the violin strings of Malcolm Goldstein almost brings me to tears, and not only at the outset, when the brittle melody by Carol Kohlsaat carries all the heartfelt love of resolve and determination of the weak to wake up and claim their justice, but also later on, as the Wolff deconstruction and reassembling sets in, because Christian Wolff has kept this sensitive feeling of the original melody all through these fragmentations, staying close to the heart of matters, never letting abstractions or artistic ventures overshadow the inherent beauty of the simplicity of the original. Masterly! This music for sure grabs hold of your emotions in a very concrete way, and Goldstein carries this across with the utmost sensitivity.

Track 13; Edges for any number of players, any number of instruments (1968). [violin and percussion]
With its 15 minutes, this piece is the longest single one on the CD.
Edges has a graphic score, which nonetheless doesn’t require such specific coordination of the players as does For 1, 2 or 3 People. The musicians have more real freedom in Edges. “Negative score” is a term that has been branded for pieces like Edges, in that the score, contrary to specifying what is to be played, rather explains what isn’t suitable.

A rather nervous picking of both violin and percussion starts the piece off into its 15-minute duration. The peculiar feeling of an edgy, nervous exchange of words in a frantic conversation somewhere in a corner of a café continues as Goldstein and Kaul proceed through this hasty, hurried beginning of the work, spinning a tight-nit pattern of thin musical threads in conversational spurs.
After a while a sense of elasticity is diffused through gluey, sticky progressions of the violin and brownish, wooden patterns in the percussion. Goldstein spins a semitransparent sphere in which Kaul’s bopping percussive events bounce, criss-crossing like atoms in a plasma.

Wilder and more violent occurrences mix wild drumming with unrestrained vocalisms and frantic fiddling, closely followed by the passage through a grove of large percussion instruments, which cast long sonic shadows through the music.
A winding, thin violin voice creeps through this sonic grove of large musical bodies, staying close to the ground, inching through the underbrush like a snake or someone’s searching hands.
Distant bells inside the web open visions of a village in southern France; church bells heard from inside a closed garden, in the shade of the leaves. Goldstein shapes a wasp’s nest with his gluey progressions, up under the roofing tile of an old building. Chagall paintings sail by in sheer imagination inside this garden summer music.
Very soft, shrill playing then embellishes the environment in colors and shades of light that open a fairytale glade in the forest, where stillness spins its web of introversion… You more sense than hear a soft ringing, as if from the soaring awareness of mind itself…