This CD descended on me like a highly mysterious work of art. I couldn’t understand it at all, and tried in vain to find a way in. All I managed was to soar around a hermetically closed sphere with a shining, smooth metallic surface, which let on nothing. Don’t misinterpret me; I could appreciate the sound art, the music – very much! It was the information on the Internet that confused me, since it sort of hinted at a massive source of information that was somehow hidden, obscured… I looked at the Durian page and the information there, mostly in German, and it didn’t make me much wiser.
I then emailed Durian Records about some hard facts, since a reinforced obscurity around a piece of art most often is a way to try to hide mediocre or inartistic circumstances, or quasi-artistic frauds - and they replied:

The Brandlmayr sound is a hard fact!!!

This wasn’t very helpful, but forced me to rethink my approach to the CD. I replied that I would write a review, then, solely based on the sounds on the CD, since I did find them fascinating, as pure electroacoustic music, and got a positive reply from the label.

I decided, however, to supply the few facts I could extract from different websites, like for example the following introduction to Appartur zu den Grundlagen der Physik I, found at the Durian site (the only English text I’ve discovered so far about the music on the CD):

It appears Peter Brandlmayr was born in 1970 in Bad Ischl, Austria. Since the fall of 1999 he has devoted his attention to the manuscripts of Professor Viktor Krylov. I haven’t, however, found much useful information about this Professor Krylov. The basics are that Viktor Krylov was born during World War II in Russia. He studied physics in Moscow, emigrated to Poland and then Germany, from where he moved to France. He became an associate professor at the Sorbonne, and was active at CERN. He was named professor in Berlin and Amsterdam and founded the Institut für Wissenschaft und Forschung in Vienna with a C. Fouché.
It appears that The Institut for Science and Research (Institut für Wissenschaft und Forschung) was founded by Professor Krylov in 1998. The director of the Institute is Professor Carl Ignaz Brom, while Professor Viktor Krylov is the superintendent.

The Institut für Wissenschaft und Forschung is dedicated to experiments with events soaring between art and science, reality and fiction. It is supposed to try to open new paths towards knowledge. A goal is to give the public possibilities of associative experiences of scientific themes. This requires an inter-disciplinary analysis. The knowledge derived from this analysis is coded on different levels and developed with various media, such as slides, film, tone, text, movement, installation to address several levels of consciousness. The events achieved represent synthesizes of the analysis, which result in manifestations in time and space. The public is to be set in resonance, in resonant vibration. The events can manifest themselves in experiments, exhibition or discussions.

The information in the paragraph above, freely translated – or maybe interpreted – from a German text, maybe sheds some light on the thought-process behind the theories which eventually led to the construction of instruments or sounding objects which I still don’t understand the true nature of, which are used for the pieces of the Brandlmayr CD. It is also possible that the aforementioned text just blurs vision even more, complicating the approach and polluting the listening process… I don’t know…
It seems to me that the music finally realized is just one aspect of many on the theories of Viktor Krylov. It is not so important in the big scheme of things, in the total concept of Krylov’s writings. I think it is possible to just listen, not knowing anything about either Krylov or Brandlmayr, but since I am a curious an inquisitive character I decided to include some of the things I came upon while desperately searching for more steadfast information about the music… I also urge the interested listener to venture into Durian Records’ website and the website of the Institut für Wissenschaft und Forschung, which are both provided above.

Included in this review – or whatever it is – are also some pictures of Brandlmayr’s instruments, which are used in the pieces heard on the CD. I supply the German text, which accompanies the pictures, which I’ve downloaded directly from the Durian site and made somewhat easier to watch through some treatments in Photoshop. The text below the pictures refers to the relevant sections of Krylov’s text.

It is evident that the music or the sounds heard are best described as sound installation sounds. That might also be evident from looking at the contraptions that Brandlmayr built from instructions found in Professor Krylov’s writings. It seems from the description of an installation that the acoustic result is derived solely from the sound of super-8-projectors and the sounds generated by the experimenter (Brandlmayr) during the experiments. I cannot readily understand how the sounds we hear can rest on that base only, if the sounds aren’t electroacoustically treated in some way. This remains an open question for the time being. If an answer surfaces, via email from Brandlmayr or someone else, I’ll insert the information here!

The track opens in a rapid succession – illusionary repetitious – of showers of tiny, sharp gray sounds, like grains or fragments of lead hitting a surface, or even more like semi-transparent layers of atomic jitter vibrating below our magnifying machines, our scanning electron microscopes, slowly but distinctly moving over into the realm of spurts of electric charges, sounding a bit like unusually behaved short-wave static. It’s on a level of microscopic and jittery energy, anyway, as if we hear events that go on in a hidden world, the micro-cosmos of out matter.
Darker and more brute sounds appear like dark rocks flowing down a mudflow, or like the brutal forces of a lava flow beneath the crust, sensed through glowing motions under dark surfaces.
More modal sounds appear some 5 minutes into the piece, in long, stretched timbres of beauty and enchantedness, interspersed with crackling electric sounds and roars from a netherworld of slow motion.
Jingling giant chains wriggle and wiggle inside the web of sounds, as if we’re inside some ominous Playstation imagination, where evil forces pose enormous threats to beings of the flesh…
Different sound characters are incised in different layers, moving in above and beneath one another, while a persistent and rather rhythmic static provides some consistency. I am very fascinated by this music, which – no matter what might be the intellectual or practical basis for it – really is good and imaginative electroacoustic music. It sets many thoughts and images in motion inside any mind that isn’t totally numb. Some sections herein remind me of one of my absolute electroacoustic favorites; Gilius van Bergeijk’s “Over de Dood en de Tijd”; a mighty electronic hommage to Franz Schubert that now is being re-released on CD by the Dutch X-OR label and its director Luc Houtkamp.

Don’t be surprised if the tracks start with silence, because they do. Brandlmayr adopts Stockhausen’s way of inserting approximately 6 seconds of silence at the beginning.
This piece is more in the vein of Norwegian sound art duo Alog or some of the newer sound pieces from Canadian No Type label, just starting its activities through the channels of empreintes DIGITALes. The rhythm is slow and efficient, albeit soft and watery blurry. It introduces a woody audio, which seamlessly slides into the sensation of chopped ice or ice-cubes in crystal bowls of vinegar. This music is a mouth-full of chunky ice-cubes and elastic rubber bands, as you sit back in a soft leather armchair. You’re in a Manhattan high rise. The view along Park Avenue reveals a river of light; the circuits of the city. Little charges jump microscopic voids in Brandlmayr’s music.

Is this a grass fire closing in on a summer cottage, or the inevitable crumpling of time…?
Attacks of louder sounds are inserted in front of the brush fire backdrop, at certain intervals, and these insertions ease out into silence via bell-like timbres. The silence in between keeps the listener’s attention wide-awake, and the feet of myriads of ants thread the newspapers that are laid out across the planet. The letters are liberated in the process, and unheard of morphemes are formed in the collective oral cavity of ant societies. Bee swarms rise and sink in this music, which taps into the secrets of insect societies… The bell-like extensions are gleaming sunlight reflections off of hoods and wings of bulky cars in hot American parking lots…
There is a meditation inside these alternating insect silences, shone through by car enamel reflections and transparent durations spiraled through space-time, winding up in the faceted eye of a wasp hovering over your head…
In the end all the letters swarm back onto the pages, bringing you the latest political bullshit, or maybe they flow back into Viktor Krylov’s “Appartur zu den Grundlagen der Physik”, once again opening the window in time needed for this CD and this review, and it all starts again, and so on and so forth, etcetera…

Crumpling static and a German-speaking voice uttering the words of the title opens the track, and the echoing, thudding remains of voices flutter around the room, inside this environment so dominated by electrical charges; the crackle of tiny sparks, like the Hattifatteners of Tove Jansson’s Moomin Valley on a particularly stormy day of lightning and thunder; the little guys charging up with sparkling vitality in the Finnish archipelago…

This sound piece commences in a gradual development, the sound increasing very slowly in volume and color, approaching like the dawn of an alien planet, an alien civilization of timbres and nuances of light and chilly temperatures. Unknown thought-forms are projected through this economic distribution of transparency across a distant horizon, felt by the vigilant scouts of intuitive consciousness, soaring and hovering like a slight refraction of the light just above the surface of the lonely world of a distant galaxy… and the self evidence of a thought manifests itself in the solitary confinement of Life: the Universe is our home; make yourself comfortable – and the significance of distance and duration looses itself in this one thought, which resounds in Brandlmayr’s sound probe into the core of matter and the core of spirit, which is in the nowhere we call everywhere, and Eternity is simply one grand Now, and it trembles in Experiment E1916/774… in angelic choruses of matter and violent rumbles of thought-forms…