I met Johannes Fritsch briefly once at the Stockhausen Courses in Kürten, on 2nd August 2002, trying to get him to pose for some photographs outside the Sülztalhalle where Stockhausen was towering over his Mischpult in between performances.
Fritsch seemed a bit surprised at my request, so I asked him: Are you not Johannes Fritsch?, to which he could but confirm that he indeed was. He stopped for a second, but the photos didn’t come out well in the flow of attendants seeping into the hall.
He was older and white-haired, but with the same stature I remember from those famous Stockhausen collaborations, in for example Aus den sieben Tagen, Kurzwellen, Mikrophonie etcetera.

The as yet rather sparse CD publication from Feedback Studio Köln is highly interesting, and seriously called-for, since the activities of the composers and musicians published on the label do have a common interest to contemporary audiences, not only because of the past connections with Karlheinz Stockhausen, but especially as a rare outlet for the special kind of exclusive musical creativity that has flourished in the Cologne area, characterized by painstaking German structuralism and intellectualism paired with the more emotional and even Sturm-und-Drang qualities of a Leopardi, Petrarca and Tasso Italian atmosphere. Add some American minimalist traits, and you have a contemporary culture of high viability and interest, unique to this grouping in Germany – with the exception of some influential cultural circles in Finland, who share the same peculiar mix of intro- and extroversion!

The look of the CDs is very simple, clear and discriminating, in black and white, and the later CDs come in exclusive, sober, clean-cut hard paper covers that are very appealing. The label has indeed found its own style, even from a packaging point of view.

CD 1 in Feedback Studio Köln’s series offers works by Johannes Fritsch himself, composed from 1981 to 1994, and recorded in the Feedback Studio in 1997 and 1998.

All of the works on the CD features flutist Natalja Psenitsnikova. She was born in Moscow, where she studied at the main music college, as well as at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. She has performed baroque music on period instruments, while also playing contemporary music and improvising. In addition, she has also worked as a vocalist in experimental contexts, and many works have been composed especially for her, by, for example, Gia Kancheli, Peter Ablinger and Johannes Fritsch.

The first piece on this Fritsch CD is Flute Klang (1981) for alto flute and delay..

The notes in the leaflet lets on that the piece originally was performed on a 4-track tape recorder, delaying the alto flute tone threefold during performance, while a performance these days utilizes a digital delay system.

The piece opens in a repeated, simple pattern och thin-layered, shining membranes of sound; a sound of soap bubble qualities, reflecting the surrounding world in fleeting nuances; continental drifts of audio spreading out across the surface of the imagined sphere.
A delay system like this immediately has you think of early Terry Riley, but this doesn’t sound so much like his pieces. This is more, albeit gloriously layered in delayed veils of bulging alto tones, reminiscent of some 1980s’ Brian Ferneyhough mineral water laconism in the shade of leafy trees by water.
The flute also makes me think of Kathinka Pasveer and her unparalleled interpretations of Stockhausen works.
Returning a brief moment to the Terry Riley association, some of this music indeed shows clear minimalist tendencies, but it is richer than most minimal works, in the skillful layering, which opens a hall of mirrors, the sound opening up endless perspectives, falling away in all directions, in motions like that of submarine plants, at mercy of undersea currents – and yes, the fluidity of the marvelous alto flute playing by Natalja Psenitsnikova has a submarine character, a dancing of light across sandy sea floors, sea horses on the move, curious.

The clicking of vents, used here as a means of sound making, also introduces a gentle, brittle percussive property, beautifully contrasting the fluidity of the rest of the flute music.

On the whole, this is playful, elegant and delicate music, joyous in a mystical way, in the midst of life, yet beyond the pettiness of daily concerns.

The second work is Kyo-Mu (1982) for shakuhachi and tape, but heard here in a version for alto flute.

A text is submitted with the work:
“39 Stücke werden 36, 36 werden 18, 18 werden 3, 3 werden eins, eins wird keins, kein Stück wird Atem, der Atem wird das leere Nichts” (Hisamatsu Fuyo, 1823)

This is by far the longest piece on the CD, more than 29 minutes. The original version with shakuhachi was premiered at the 2nd World Music Congress in Vlotho (Westfalen – Lippe, Germany) in 1982.

The work emerges in the muffled beat of a heart, a little excited, in 86 beats per minute. A jingling steel chain audio is poured ever so slightly along the progression of the heartbeat, adding some musique concrète to the cardiovascular composition, while also a static electronic backdrop grows in intensity, like a whining state of mist across the field, where the forest stands attentive, still.
The electronic sound screws seem to refer to shortwave radio, while some more brute sounds have you think of railway cars ambling along a switchyard, or the hulls of general cargo ships rising like dark omens along the foggy wharfs of Western cities…

The alto flute appears in this haze as a mind reader and a beacon, like a torch in this darkness and obscurity, growing in intensity and… clarity; offering a way in and a way out, through meditation to activity, and from activity to introspective stillness.
A vibrant tone from a synthesizer, gut deep, envisions power and subterra, emotional traits beyond intellectual control, or simply the part of the iceberg of consciousness that lies beyond the surface. The interpretation is yours, is mine, and the presence of physicality is evident through the heartbeat which guarantees anatomy, flesh and blood and breathing, and flexing muscles carrying a being across a planet.

Wavelike motions in the sound picture take on the guise of an ocean swell, adding yet more powerful visions of life on the rim of a sphere rolling in the cosmic starlight.
More lyrical alto flute outbursts alongside the motor hum and the incidental percussive elements introduce pictures of a Mediterranean boy god with golden locks, playing his flute on a backdrop of blue waters, blue skies, in an atmosphere of perfection before Man, his feet in the sand, the light from the star bathing the divine habitat.

Johannes Fritsch’s mixing of the live and the recorded, and his intertwining of alto flute and electronic and concrete sounds is diligent, fluent, completely natural. You never care what’s electronic and what’s not when you listen. The piece just becomes one fluent, exciting and also beautiful experience.

I’m also very satisfied to find stretches of rougher, early-type electronic music distributed here and there, and some of the percussive incidents open up industrial workshops in steelworks along the Baltic coast, and remind me a little of Stockhausen’s carpenterous hammering of nails in INTENSITÄT out of Aus den sieben Tagen.

Watery sounds, bubbling, dripping, appear with remains of by-sweeping voices, perhaps in a subway station environment. Intense generator hums of varying pitches attach gluey timbral beauty to the tympanic membranes of the hearing.
The heartbeat sometimes hides inside the sounds when they’re loud, but you get reassured each time the volume drops back a bit and the alto flute plays its garlands of introspection.
Bubbling beads of bright shortwave static embellish the hazier places in the work, while unafraid voices echo somewhere deep inside a hall of uncertain properties, perhaps in an Aniara goldonder lost towards the Lyre, or in an ancient cave, or in the community hall of Kürten.

Natalja Psenitsnikova’s alto flute sometimes shows up very close, right in front of you, with a wheezing sound of rushing air through the mouthpiece, her long hair touching your forehead for a short instant as she flies by in a cloud of electronics… and watch out for the semicircle of the shining flute; a samurai sword cutting through the air in musical Psenitsnikova gestures!

I light some specially imported Tibetan incense and let mind and music flow, in the conviction that justice is a quality built into universe and existence, revealing itself along the lives we travel in our body vehicles.

Track 3 is Noel (1990) for three flutes; large flute [große Flöte], alto flute in G and bass flute, all played by Natalja Psenitsnikova in a playback version of the piece. Johannes Fritsch wrote the work during Christmas 1990.

As it begins, calmly, in elastic, stretching tones, like high, thin dawn clouds across the ocean horizon, I feel Feldmanesque. I come to think about a piece by Morton Feldman called Three Voices, where a singer (for example Joan La Barbara or Beth Griffith) sings with two pre-recorded tapes of her own voice. Though not the same, and without the Frank O’Hara poem, this Johannes Fritsch piece achieves the same meditative, timeless state of mind. You may concentrate on any of the three flute voices, or loose yourself in the brilliance of timbres, in the texture of overtones and oscillations.
Noel is long enough to get certain aspects of meditative attention in place; 19 minutes – but I could easily hear this in a full-length CD of 80 minutes, because it is so immensely beautiful and intriguing, also sharpening your hearing as you sit back to float along this timbral bliss, completely at rest in yourself, your personal predicaments falling away like dirt and dust, revealing the shining Buddha nature of your real self. The Tibetan incense is still rising to the ceiling, even better in spiritual time with this piece than the preceding one. I feel lucky.

The 4th and final piece on the CD is VIII ’94 (1994) for alto flute and temple bell [Tempelglocke].
Careful, searching alto flute tones find their way apprehensively along, as if in a dark garden at night, while sparse, clicking or dripping percussive strokes make me think of bamboo sticks and Japanese landscapes. It’s brittle, sparse, delicate, sketchy, like rice paper calligraphy, a lot of silence allowed center stage.
I keep my incense burning, and it feels just more and more in place as I listen further into Johannes Fritsch’s CD.
VIII ’94 is very introspective, suited for elevation into higher states of consciousness. The first temple bell insertion spreads sudden gold through the thin air atmosphere, and as the flute moves ever so slightly – or remains in a spiral of time that keeps returning to the same coordinates, though on an ever-ascending plane – the temple bell is sounded just a couple of more times in long intervals, until the music softly sinks back into the silence from whence it rose, leaving you soaring, weightless. Magnificent!