The impression of the package is impressive, unusual, perhaps reminding me some of the conceptual ideas of Winter & Winter, and I don’t know how practical it is, but it is, none the less, designed…

The booklet contains such good and extended essays on the music of Olga Neuwirth that it feels almost unnecessary to write this review, but I don’t know if those texts by Elfriede Jelinek and Stefan Drees can be found anywhere on the Internet, so I’ll continue with my own impressions.

Just the titles themselves make me curious. Anyone capable of finding titles like these must have a special kind of aesthetics, of humor, and I’m sure this serious looking lady does ‘cause I can detect a streak of mischievousness in her eyes too…

Her homepage is simple, functional and almost ascetic, and comes across as a precisely attributed combination of artistry and information. This is Neuwirth’s personal bio and antecedentia, directly ripped off of her page:

Instrumental-Inseln aus Bählamms fest I, II & III (1997 – 1999/2000) for a centrally positioned ensemble and live electronics are three works with such an intriguing background, that I can’t omit it here. Stefan Drees tells the story in his text on Neuwirth’s music:

That explained, we go into the sound of Instrumental-Inseln I aus Bählamms Fest for a centrally positioned ensemble and live electronics, which opens the CD.

It starts without a beginning; full force from the first second. It renders a strange texture, which pans right and left, almost like the effect you sometimes get on old, worn out reel-to-reel tapes, but here this is a conceptual phrasing of spatiality.
The web of sound is very intricate, intellectual, Western, but somewhere in here is a space for Eastern reflection and introspection, hidden inside the core of a seemingly incoherent, uncomposed maze of tingling percussion and droning electronics, sometimes dying down to a peaceful humming of a generator, onto which a thin graffiti of golden tonal gestures are painted with a sable’s hair pencil.
Tender timbres shimmer like a pale light across the ensemble, shrouded in an electronic guise, and sometimes little boy-gods of a Greek tale play their piccolos at a backdrop of a blue Mediterranean Sea, as Olga Neuwirth bores ever deeper through the superposed layers of Chronos, sifting sound and ages for that brilliant essence of existence, so valuable, so elusive, so hard to come by in our Karmic Bardos…
At one point a jolly little melody dances the children of us all in a spiral motion across the meadows of our youth, under the mighty foliage of our oaks of childhood.
Alas, this timbral and gestural whirlwind, though transparent in all its richness, is to be heard and relived many times over, and I suspect I only catch a very few of the inherent visions of the work on a first run-through of her musical labyrinths.

Vampyrotheone (1995) for three soloists and three ensemble formations follows. From reading Stefan Drees’ introduction (not quoted here) I understand that this too is a bewildering musical experience with numerous ingredients and a funky sort of artistic realization.

It glides like a squeaky steel cage down a rocky slope, in a cloud of stone dust and a fiery smell of hardline friction. The scenery is wide, the sights of an alien, perhaps African character, and the steel cage of Vampyrotheone trembles and shakes, little birds fluttering in and out between metallic bars.
During a particularly silent section the music sounds just like the breathing of a human, but somehow this music says something about pre-human concepts, completely geological, stratum per stratum, though pre-echoes of much later times are intertwined here and there, like grainy fragments of musical prophecies, indecently distant in the period of this steel cage.
The activity that goes on inside this frantic cubic cage space is partly ornithological, partly geological and partly psychological. It’s impossible to tell out of what subconscious depths some of this Neuwirthian outbreaks of rage, counter-pointed with a softspoken, asklepiadic gaze out of calm eyes, really stem, and it’s as hard to determine any clear cut interfaces between geology and music, between psychology and matter; it’s all smoking here in a crunchy, tormenting expression of contained (?) turmoil and eruptive dynamic processes.

Instrumental-Inseln II aus Bählamms Fest for a centrally positioned ensemble and live electronics enters slowly, carefully, sifted, like nightfall or a slow dusk through the garden, like the movements of your cat, who lives his secret life in the borderline territory of domestications and wilderness, in the magic state of flux between the mystical and the matter-of-factly, bringing a fragrance of mystery into your human predicament, carrying some human scent out into the misty streaks of fairies and elves at the far end of consciousness… where he has who-knows-what kind of spiritual exchanges with the forces and the powers…
I reach out my hand and touch a cold, dewy apple in a tree in the middle of this imaginary garden, and I feel connected to the entirety, to, as Allen Ginsberg said, “the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”, and the evening draws colder and darker in Olga Neuwirth’s music as I stand inside my imagination, straining my eyes to still see the white garden furniture grouped like a family of white rhinoceroses over in the passing of the moments of dusk.
As the work moves towards its conclusion it turn elegiac and melancholy, a trumpet pouring muffled honey into the chilly air of night, sweetening the death of mosquitoes and wasps…

Hooloomooloo (1996 – 1997) for ensemble with CD recording draws its inspiration from a triptych by Frank Stella, from a series called Imaginary Places. Indeed the title suggests some planet in the remote parts of the galaxy in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or some forlorn and absentminded creature in Tove Jansson’s Moomin Valley…
Again, for a more “scientific” ride through this music I happily refer you to the rich booklet of the issue, and the articles by Elfriede Jelinek and Stefan Drees. I, for one, let my somewhat stumbling and tripping imagination run wild in this intricate Olga Neuwirth labyrinth dotted with refreshing arbors, never knowing where I’ll end up, or if I’ll end up at all… because that’s the way I live the music. Someone – a very inexperienced person – recently told me that I wasn’t objective in music texts, and I replied with all my heart that objectivity is the one thing, the ONLY thing, I absolutely detest and abhor, and that I only strived after a solid subjectivity all the way through a listening experience. Objectivity is absolutely forbidden in my writings; please count on that – in case you ever wondered… Let death be objective; I live!

A single line stretches out towards the sea, in this moonlit night, in Hooloomooloo, and its the barbed wire fence beginning of this piece, inconspicuous at a distance, but cutting you to threads at too close an encounter; poison and moonlight, a coastline with a soft swell bulging in over rocks and pebbles… but soon heavy, bouncing events conjure giants of the earth out of the shadows, into a ghastly conference of uncertain properties, an uncertain agenda…
A merging of Stravinsky and Grieg; can it be possible? It is here, but both Igor and Edvard are bent out of shape and whack, and a piano is ready in back of the real, to charge forward at the slightest sign… like a cat lying in the grass, waiting for the right moment to jump a mouse, wagging its tail violently…
The barbed wire fence, the singular progression of a tone, is manifest for most of the time, providing a direction, perhaps, for wild jumbles of tones, appearing at break-neck speed in heavy slabs of music, distributed like Charkov yogurt in glass bottles of the 1970s… secret note paper poems handed from person to person in wrinkled Pravdas… and a little later Olga Neuwirth moves forcefully forward like Luciano Berio in Eindrücke.
With only four minutes or so to go, rash and sarcastic scrapings of double-basses define places in space with cunning smiles out of the corner of mouths, and I’m in a upholsterer’s workshop, the smell of turpentine rising through nostrils, the music fondling furniture… at times reminding me of Crypt With Table & Chairs by Akos Rózmann.

Instrumental-Inseln III aus Bählamms Fest for a centrally positioned ensemble and live electronics finishes this remarkable sound carrier.
A light chamber ensemble beginning opens an unusually clear and clean sound space, little glass beads hanging on strings from the ceiling, mirrors gleaming around the walls, light coming down from a shaft above… but chatter-boxes are turned on around the area, and staccato trumpets hammer their messages through any intellectual or phobic resistance… and into this a sentimental melody in the wind section is let in, like a memory of simpler days, when life was more down to earth and self-evident… but deep murmurs and clicks from woodblocks make sure that those long gone circumstances only appear as reminiscences, and timpanis rumble straight through your anatomy, like the relentlessness determination of the medical examiner at an autopsy… and it’s all over now, baby blue… as distant sirens of the world out there merge and mingle with serene signals arriving from the subconscious through the cerebral cortex, like meteorites shooting across the sky, flaring up and dying down, leaving a soundless trace behind on your retina…