The cover of this CD - displayed above! – carries a message in itself, in that dreamy, fin-de-siècle feeling of utmost desolation, albeit carrying a lot of poetry through its lonely stillness. The cover comes across as a scene out of a Tarkovsky movie; perhaps Nosthalgia!

I don’t even begin to listen to the content of the CD until after a long time of contemplating this striking cover, which stirs so strong feelings and associations and… daydreams or even visions in me. I come to think of Swedish austere aphorist write Vilhelm Ekelund (1880 – 1949), whose pre-aphorism poetry sometimes conveyed the same transparent, lucid melancholy that the misty atmosphere of this GROB cover engulfs you in.

I look at the credits on the back, and find that someone (or a company?) simply called Trouver, is responsible for the photo. The general design was conceived by Janene Higgins, so thanks to one and all who created this magnificent cover. I believe this is the first time I’ve lingered so long on the cover of a CD, before getting to the music!

Elliott Sharp, reaching out of the New York avant-garde creativity, has always moved in and out of styles and genres, at home in free jazz, punk, new music etcetera, without ever hanging his hat on the hook for too long. This restlessness has accommodated him a home in the wind, from whence his art reaches us on the vibrations of the guitar, the bass clarinet, the soprano saxophone, the electronics… and he composes too. Check out http://www.algonet.se/~repple/esharp/es.html for much more information on Elliot Sharp.

Reinhold Friedl, with whom Sharp teams up this time, is a pianist and a composer in Berlin. Collaborators of Friedl, in addition to Elliott Sharp, have included Dieter Schnebel, Melvyn Poore, Paul Lovens, Keith Rowe, Mario Bertoncini, Dror Feiler, Phill Niblock, Witold Szalonek ...

Among his duties is a position as the musical director of the renowned Zeitkratzer Ensemble, which dwells in the telltale creativity of fresh new ideas and tendencies in the yet-to-come, in the positively un-famous niche of new music, at gut and gutter level. Friedl and Sharp met in Zeitkratzer. Friedl engages in preparations and unorthodox methods of prying sounds out of his instrument, which also is a piece of furniture down the latest centuries.

A set of jingle jangle metal threads spread like the cracks in glass from the center of this music, which in INBLICK spins this jigsaw pattern of austere and quite mineral progressions in a fractal movement.

A CHANCE MOMENT maybe is just that, as high pitches – just like a small population of Regulus regulus up the protected realm of dusk of the spruces of fall time forests – chirp out of the electrified instruments of Elliott Sharp and Reinhold Friedl.
A grainy substance of audio with inherent sharp edges of sonic jewelry is smeared out across the listening space, as a highly communicative guitar talks sheer hell out of you, leaving you cleansed and de-demonized! This thing gets going, kicks ass, starts fires, dances frivolously! The web is rich, densifying and spreading quickly! Some sounds of strings – probably Friedl’s indoor piano operations – envision a plasterer applying his surface with a trowel. This ends like a piece of trowel in excited action across a larger surface!

SAND is a foghorn way out in some dire straits off of the coast of Maine, perhaps, calling out to seafarers of all ages not to hit the rocks of time, but keep free of all constraints! The saxophone – Elliott Sharp – mumbles loudly in a contradictory way, while Friedl provides the metal of accompaniment. The piece is so interesting that I leave it with some reluctance to head for the next track.

INKOGNITO is also pretty short, with bass strings thudding on par with the trickling deeper keys of the piano, in almost toneless strands of audio, achieved in a pointillist manner, albeit with some brute force and escaping wails of the guitar. Marvelous! I could hear this for hours!

The title track – NOSTALGIA – is also the longest, with its almost eleven minutes. This is pretty long in a context where so much energy and strife is let loose in the spurs of the moment, in an improvised exhilaration filtered through the technical skill and imaginative visions of these two blessed musicians, who manages to connect to the sub-conscious through-out, just letting it flow.
This opens like an eerie fog on a quay late in fall, the atmosphere of rusty iron structures screaming through existence in an earless expression of painful mineral perceptions… It’s a thundering, repetitious despair of mist and metal; the two opposite sides of pain.
This sometimes sounds electroacoustically achieved, but then you detect the individual instruments in the fog, identifiable through their own characteristic squeaks and whines from within the core of existential despair… It’s beautiful and repulsive! I am very attracted to this!
Little springs of metal shoot up like tiny New Year’s rockets inside the gruesome layers of pain, and somewhere in there something screeches like the late wildflowers of fall, nibbled and eventually subdued by frost and chilly morning sunlight low across the horizon… yes, the sunlight screeches across the fields…

AFTERLIGHT comes on rhythmically and carefully, bass and springy, short, withheld and subdued exclamations, providing an elastic base layer on which to project nervous little whims and etudes. I listen to this like I listen to sound artist Sune Karlsson’s 12-hour house-hold work PHONIA DOMESTICA from 1988; with an open mind, leaning with pleasure against the rising wall of musical expression which moulds oxygen, rubber, wood and steel into a comforting message of withstanding durability through space-time; no need to worry, just enjoy the sharpening of perception that Sharp and Friedl offer!
The whistling Gypsy Rover intellectualism towards the conclusion and the galloping horse-shoe mimicry only serves to raise the sense of pleasure to orgiastic levels, as your hearing is floating on a welling-forth of shadowy and pre-echoed bliss which spirals itself many times over.

OSTSEH is another rather extended piece. It’s beginning is fragile, like thin glass or again… mist – but in a more tender atmosphere of a timeless beyond, layering existence or reflections of existence in bells of slowed-down precipitation and a fast tapping of thimbled fingertips across your forehead, sinking you into a state of hypnosis… aah, it’s the sound of a thousand steel barrels rolling across a glacier in the distance, watched over by fire-gods…
This is a droning, Terry Rileyish all-night flight kind of expression, and it fits my late afternoon mind just perfectly, way into September!

There are more tracks on the CD, and they’re all interesting, intricate, enjoyable; adventurous audio!