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Nils Bultmann Nils Bultmann [viola – keyboards – Wurlitzer – breath – vocals] The opening bars of this CD – from the tune Welcome – signal romantic gestures in the air, like someone standing on a rock overlooking the ocean, motioning with torches to eventual ships way out in the darkness. The piece has the intensity of a Bach partita and the melancholy of anyone’s introverted thoughts in fall. Melancholy and a certain elegant attitude to life in clear view of death is characteristic of the sound of the viola, certainly obvious in this brief encounter with a solo piece by Nils Bultmann. Mr. Bultmann [1975, Germany] stands his very own musical ground out West, if you consider him from out East. He grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, now residing in the San Francisco area. He is – as this first work on the CD suggests – a violist, and as the wonderful, dedicated, graceful and ceremonious playing reveals, he comes out of classical perspective on art, but he improvises masterly, too. In addition to his classical repertoire, he plays his own compositions, and also works in the wider settings of dance and film. This CD also shows part of his avant-garde side. While I’ve been sitting here thinking about many things, I’ve had the first track – Welcome – on repeat, long after I stopped listening consciously for this review, and it suddenly dawned on me, after I woke up out of my thoughts, that the little melody had created a whole atmosphere in which I’d existed for all that time of thinking. It colored my thoughts and dreams in violet and blue, to almost black, with a slight scent of Nag Champa incense. Roscoe Mitchell joins Bultmann on track 2, in a tune called… 2… trilling away in lyric statements on his tenor saxophone, while Bultmann lets his bow bounce lightly in rhythmic, kind of Kletzmery patterns, inwardly repetitious. Mitchell’s saxophone sonorities stand on toe, sticking long bird necks up across the wild reeds. The piece is a communication, two close but different beings out of a fairytale or a dream, discussing how to get out of this world alive! Wonderful! Third is the madness; a longer piece at 7 minutes. Starting as a soundscape; a cityscape with people talking, moving, or a brief encounter in a North African market place – a djembe played by Paddy Cassidy twirls the moments on a chain of causality, skipping past the units of time like a rabbit through the underbrush of a dry land. Bultmann’s viola and Parry Karp’s cello tighten up the worldview, rising up the staircase of the Tor up above Glastonbury’s witches’ conference like water up trees in osmosis and capillary action. The djembe renders this bit a special, African long distance historical reconnaissance, the hot air of day changing into the bitterly cold, star-gleaming desert night; the sounds of cardamom being crushed in bronze mortars for the strong coffee in the Bedouin tents, life reducing itself down to the solid bare necessities; a nice, down-scaled position on the slowly turning giant. You can hear the low hum of existence. The body isn’t even a hideout anymore, but a good starting place for the universe to meditate on itself.
Tune nr 4 is called Sketches of spirit; a thoughtful, turned-away moment for viola and cello, opening in dark feelings, barely breathing, but slowly rising from the deep notes of the cello to gradually higher viola tones. The melody is an ascension of the human spirit out of the decaying leaves of late fall, but an ascent without any real celebration; the sound of a soul coming to terns with the long process of deaths and rebirths, gaining lofty views across many lifetimes. So beautiful. marched upward, track 5, really does march, in a joyous and determined hoquetus fashion, limping and hopping along, tapping the syllables of an imagined language down the ducts of perception; itching urges for dancing! The viola rubs feverishly, while the piano marks the uneven and almost falling-off points of reference. Track 7 – still strangely serene – sneaks upon you in long, winding measures behind your back in that long spiral staircase of bygones. Yes, your magic past is whispering in the darkness, but the emotions in these motions are clear and not dubious, fiery and not obscure. Reverently is the eighth title, quite different from anything I’ve heard so far on this CD. The first seconds silent, a distant male voice slowly appearing at second 18. It’s Bultmann speaking, according to the info on the CD cover. Roscoe Mitchell enters close to the listener, playing the flute in loud meditation, while Bultmann stands some way off, in the ambience of a large hall (and you hear some cough out of an audience), reciting what seems like a philosophical, or political – and at some point religious text, mentioning Virgin Mary, Joseph and also Jesus. Reverently is like an anonymous piece of text-sound, cut out of the flow of time and placed somewhere else: in the binary successions on this compact disc; sound like a found object. At track 9 we find a piece called absorbing, very short at just 1:46. It does bring on a sensation of blotting-paper space; i.e. a sounding space, existing space, which absorbs you into a centre of emptiness; a backward big bang; perhaps a small crunch. Looking at it in another way, I feel respiration here, inhaling and exhaling, the viola rocking back and forth like a ship cast out on the sea, leaning this way and that – a melody which I’d like to hear for a longer duration, to recede into, to rest inside, to travel with.
again at track 10 demonstrates, like in some earlier track (is that why it’s called again?), this madly marching rhythm, on top of, or in the vicinity of longer strokes of the brush. The rhythmic catharsis dissipates, leaving room for winding fairytale bean stalks, moving at the viola speed of human visibility up the church wall, like in the old ballad Barbara Allen, only to slow down into a beta blocker calmness as the English fields and hills with their narrow roads and dense hedges around Crewkerne, Somerset expand below our fantasized lofty point of observance. A henhouse full of excited poultry, mimicried by Bultmann on his viola, deep inside an overwhelmingly powerful and sweet, gluey, mudsliding Wurlitzer: that is track 11’s original the pulsing. The pulsing ingredient is the Wurlitzer that starts up some time into the piece, which commences with the lyric viola likeness of reefer Middle Eastern club nights with Marko Melkon (1895 – 1963), or Yiorgo Anestopoulos – or Udi Yorgo Bacanos (1900 – 1977). It’s elegant and violet; a certain melancholy while the viola way off inside the Wurlitzer pulsations seem to be run through a 1960s’ fuzzbox! Lovely commotion! primal is the generously scraped tune at track 12, Bultmann again in single combat with himself, hitting here, hitting there, bouncing around, from one side of the street to the other, in fact moving though two parallel streets different simultaneously, like photons through a grating in a quantum mechanic experiment which questions the significance of both time and place; of situation – but arriving at the town square at the same time (simultaneity is an illusion, though...), side by side with himself!
Finally - after the very short viola piece silent at track 13, which appears just like a breath of perfumed air, or the sensation of two subway trains moving with slightly different velocities close by each other down a city tunnel; the people’s faces so close, but so far away (like you is said to be able to reach far places on “the other side” of the universe through wormholes) – we have the last track, ocean, at nr. 14.
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