Mark Polscher’s first CD, realized between April and September of 1999, consists of electronic music divided into a seamless progression of Sektoren (in German) or Sectors (in English), instead of the more familiar division into movements.
As you can see from the cover, with neatly and strictly stacked containers, one might expect some kind of orderliness or structure in this work, and I feel one indeed does. I get a peculiar sense of an unruly creativity, actually bursting dangerously at its seems, forced into the liberation of order, i.e. an overwhelming resource of frantic power intelligently finding its necessary release through the orderly structure that Polscher provides in his composition.

It feels a bit hazardous to me, this gallant handling of unruly and restless force, but maybe it’s a case of the upper layers of consciousness, the thin lacquer, if you will, which conceals the fearful havoc of mighty powers in the unconscious, trying to encompass the dangers within by way of logical reasoning… which always, anyway, will appear in the guises of scarecrows of your mind in your dreams and in the bardos; maybe that is the content of this music…

In any case, Polscher succeeds in relating this sense of danger within through his music, and I shouldn’t be surprised, having met this composer for some periods of time, because somehow his personality, or should I say his apparition, adheres to this theory of mine; his orderliness of gestures and linguistics, which contrasts sharply to the sometimes glowing wilderness of his gaze and the jagged contour of his ideas, is consistent with the under-cover insanity of un-controlled force which has, for its own purposes, agreed to a misalliance with proper functions of life structures, resulting in the sounding extracts of this position that we hear on this CD. Magnificent! I seldom get scared listening!

Perhaps we should give this music the same worth and significance we do body language, i.e. a give-away of hidden aspects of character and intent? Maybe! Perhaps this is so in all good, honest art that goes beyond style, fashion and trends?

The first Sektor is also the longest, with a duration of just about 18 minutes. At first this does remind me – I’m sure Polscher doesn’t object or mind… - of some stretches of electronic music out of the Stockhausen oeuvre. We hear this ever-stretching rumble of a drone, like the sound of existence itself, or like the gushing of life-carrier blood behind our temples, into which Mark Polscher throws goods of all kinds, sudden thoughts or glimpses of Buddha-nature insights which are taken away downstream in the wild commotion of the rapids between the high but brittle rock walls of guarding consciousness.

Polscher in this gets in line with an old and good tradition of electronics and electroacoustics; that of laying out a grand base sound onto which individual sounds of shorter duration can be applied. This is very effective, and gives the composer many possibilities; even that of working in real-time, somewhat like Michel Waisvisz does with his own sound tool inventions, when he simply moves his arms, hands and fingers to mold the soaring flow of audio into intricate structures of sonic morphemes through an electromagnetic force field.

One of the first – and mightiest – encounters I had with music made this way was Pär Lindgren’s Rummet from 1980; a revelation to many, and certainly to me. That piece of music changed my perception of sounds forever, and it also make me feel quite at home in Mark Polscher’s Automatik, even though both Lindgren’s and Polscher’s works instill fear in the perceptive listener. I wonder how a child with unspoiled senses would react to this music.

Polscher has worked a lot with the timbres of this stream of audio, because it is many-layered and varied in its relentless flow, as high altitude sonics sweep across the mind like showers of meteorites across a dark winter’s sky on Earth, or like electric sparks through the circuits of our cerebral cortexes, while the ominous and heavy armor of desert wars deep inside the secrets of the unconscious rumbles towards the Baghdad of Life, where enchanted visions of palaces with exuberant mosaics are seen by thirsty eyes through the incense of ages, as the latter-day Morlochs approach with laser lightshows through the sand storms, leaving traces of blood in the heartland.
Wailing trajectories of cries of mental pain rise above the surface like solar flares, only to fall back down into the bottomless pit of self-centeredness while Samsara swallows the spirit lost in the hall of mirrors of his own fruitless grasping.
Harsh and ugly sounds munch away at the contents of bliss without as much as bruising it, because it is evident, in Tibetan Buddhism as well as in this Polscher soundings, that the inherent truth of existence cannot be bothered by the spoils of samsara wars, and as the smoke of day-to-day life and its futile battles clears away, the true nature of mind will be obvious – and am I mad to feel this message throughout this music?

The Sektoren or Sectors of Automatik are individual and different from each other, while the atmosphere that permeates the whole work as such is evident in all its parts. This is hands-on spiritual sensibility and technical finesse paired with musical intuition and practical ingenuity, throughout! It all makes for a very rewarding listening.

Sektor II, for example, is a slower, more incisive cut into reality, like a tank stopping in the desert, the soldiers climbing out, descending onto the desert floor, peering over finds on the ground, turning debris over to find clues as to their origin. In Sektor II the bulging and retreating bubbles of sound stay in one place, a group of aliens on a foreign celestial body, or a stray group of thoughts in an unfamiliar world of ideas.

Sektor III is more austere, abstract or perhaps dreamy; a foggy vision, a mirage across the landscape. I get a feeling of an enormous swarm of bees or other insects overhead, and a repetitious, drawn-out rhythm of Southern France church bells hovering in the distance like a salvation out of reach, because in the dream your limbs are so heavy you can’t lift them, even though your whole being urges for those distant, elastic bells of the Mediterraneans…
Shrill and more abrupt sounds arise in a conversational manner, like the outlines of human speech filled with the means of metallic electronics. I get associations to some works by Swedish pioneer Lars-Gunnar Bodin somewhere inside this aspect of the piece, which otherwise has more in common with French dreamologics like Luc Ferrari or Jean-Claude Risset.
Towards the conclusion of the work everything stops dead in its tracks, as the metallic morphemes swing and sway inside the contours of speech, in an alien and turned-away conversation of rusting structures in an abandoned world or a forgotten tool shed in the periphery of our mind…

Sector IV surprises with an initial beat of modern dance floor palaces of indecent actions; highly erotic jerks of hips and thighs in the semi-darkness of lust, as Twiggy-shaped wooden dolls enter the forbidden realms of human sexual lust, to which only the flesh has admission. Intoxicated Pinocchio figures with white, flashing teeth and burning eyes swarm in from adjacent rooms, and the orgy is evident in the pulsating sounds of the Polscher music. It’s a dark musical verification of the borderland of organic and inorganic matter, the jealousy of the inorganics opening forbidden dimensions of artificial lust…

Sector V has an inconspicuous beginning in sounds discerned in a 1950s radio, caught and brought back in the safety of latter-day sound media… and I can sense Polscher turning the levers to explore deep into the philosophical significance of these old sounds re-enacted on a stage of today.
These small sounds – almost Cageian – are soon all but drenched in a very low, infra layer of rumbling darkness, while the unexpected sense of moisture is introduced in dripping sensations quite close.
It gradually gets considerably louder towards the end, and suddenly springs of electronics are popping up like instant fungi out of the underbrush, making you dodge and scramble for something more safe, a forest ice-age rock or anything which may provide consistency… while pygmy owls (Glaucidium passerinum) stare at you from their branches…

Sektor VI opens on a melodic spur…, which however doesn’t kid me! I sense immediately that this is a children’s chant only serving the purpose of luring you into your childhood and its soap bubbles of summer, while you’re actually entering a dreamscape of the senses provided by Mr. Polscher for your fearful entertainment, and not long after the show begins I meet Frank Zappa in sudden glary dips into simulated guitar gestures of much sarcasm… in an early morn corn flakes and pasteurized milk session of Mid Americana suburban suicides…
Some of this is more erratic than what we’ve heard before, more random, haphazard… and some of the sounds are echoes of the early WDR electronics of Herbert Eimert, Gottfried Michael Koenig and Giselher Kiebe, to mention but a few, which is only suiting and appropriate on the first CD of a German composer of electronic music, nicht wahr?
Towards the end I get a Stockhausenesque feeling, and that is surely appropriate too! Here’s to the Man!

Sektor VII introduces itself with bird chirp credentials, and I slip into my electronic bird watching gear, grab my electronic bird book and my electronic ornithology notebook. I’m set! The rustling of yesteryear’s leaves appear in harsh footings under the brancheries of springtime forests, but since this piece is quite short, it only hints at the possibilities of electronic ornithology. It’s a pleasing, fresh air encounter in the laser box!

Sektor VIII is also rather short, entering in the guise of the whistling gypsy… or is it the Snufkin returning to the Moomin Valley in springtime, after his winter time wanderings in the southern lands, an independent Bob Dylan thinker of the Tove Jansson imagination? I can see him, one morning, sitting on the rail of the wooden bridge, smoking his pipe or playing a jolly melody on his harmonica, as self evident as the migrant birds suddenly appearing, as if they’d always been there; a fait accompli of spring!
Looking at this piece with the goggles of electronic antecedence on, I feel some kinship to the early Russian synthesizer ANS, demonstrated on a CD of historical contents on Artemiy Artemiev’s label Electroshock in Moscow. However, Polscher’s piece also has a brittle, transparent, glassy value, non-existent in the ANS recordings, which lean more heavily towards the factory whistle idiom of the early communist 1920s and its adolescence aspirations of salvation through distribution of matter.

Finally, Sektor IX concludes the set in a jerky wooden doll melody which explodes into an eerie soundscape of falling buildings and rising suns; a redemption of sound through a collapse of the material world, a dinner at the Restaurant At the End of the Universe gone wrong, the time capsule cracked open at the last stages of this grand habitat of ours, consciousness as we know it seeping out into timelessness as the space-time continuum slowly ceases to exist in the last, vibrating twitching of Sektor IX audio…