“An ambient work that sails in the darkness and between its 4 main visions”
1 The Rumpenheim Performance - Set 1 30:40
2 The Rumpenheim Performance - Set 2 32:36
3 Encore Rumpenheim 12:36
(CD/DDL 75:52) (V.F.)
(Dark Ambient Music)
Following the album One January Evening, AMBIENT CHAPEL- Live at Schlosskirche Rumpenheim 2018 is the second concert recording from Bridge to Imla. This one was held as part of the Rumpenheim Art Days in the Schlosskirche Rumpenheim chapel in 2018. For this occasion, Michael Brückner and Hans-Dieter Schmidt invited the percussionist and ambiences sculptor Volker Lankow. The trio thus sculpts an atmospheric work that sails in the darkness between its pastoral, bucolic, tribal and electronic visions with improvisations tinged with an attraction for tribal music and Jazz, especially in the second part of Set 2. Available as factory-pressed CD and presented in a cover whose brassy colors embrace many passages of the album, AMBIENT CHAPEL- Live at Schlosskirche Rumpenheim 2018 also benefits from a good bank of samplings at the level of voices and sound effects, thus enhancing the abstruse character of an electronic music (EM) rich of its paradoxes.
The Rumpenheim Performance - Set 1 begins with a buzzing breeze and a tenebrous synth wave. Monks' voices hum a psalm whose indistinct murmurs turn around a light swirl of electronic sound effects on a passage where the two extremes are engaged in an interesting duel between pastoral ambiences and an electronic music torn between its contemporary and bucolic visions. These voices will return later in other forms and different textures. An electric piano rises above these first 5 minutes with the violins of clemency which make float their misty arabesques above a meadow where sheep graze. The paradoxes...! Driven by the inspiration of the 3 musicians, the music evolves in parameters of the paranormal with layers full of disparate spectres' voices which melt in this agrarian decoration. Ambient and dark yes, the music of AMBIENT CHAPEL- Live at Schlosskirche Rumpenheim 2018 has the appearance of it. As it is also jostled by pre-recorded percussion samplings that appear as early as the 8th minute of The Rumpenheim Performance - Set 1. With no rhythmic goals, but seductive enough, they are the cradle of this drowsiness that takes hold of our senses, while the electric piano continues its oratorical flight also without any harmonic vision. The drums always plough an anaesthetic structure which melts under the immense soporific layers of an EM which makes a pleasant compromise between its cradle of meditation and its rhythm fractured in several places in this album. Except that mostly, the first part gives way to more atmospheric moments, like these ambient flute airs on a bed of intriguing sound effects from the 16th minute. Following a slightly more intense atmospherical passage, the percussions reanimate the ambient vision of this long 30 minutes track about 30 seconds of the 22nd minute. Some silky orchestrations wrap these beats that flirt with a tribal tendency nuanced by a good exploration of the bass line and keyboard riffs. Keyboard that also scatters these keys with a more melodic vision, not overly so, in a final segment of The Rumpenheim Performance - Set 1 that buries itself in the intensity of a layer of bluish and silver lines for a more esoteric finale.
More oriented towards percussions, The Rumpenheim Performance - Set 2 proposes an opening awakened by bass and/or double bass chords under these cerulean metal layers which mainly occupy the firmament of this chapel. Samplings of voices with indistinct words decorate an introduction based on mysticism that percussions make jolt with strikes always without rhythmic vision, but which are more similar to explosions of thunders under a firmament darkening more and more. The sun seems to come out of the darkness around the 11th minute with chirps of sparrows in beautiful orchestrations bringing a radiant sky. A virtual string ensemble embellishes this meditative passage, which continues beyond the 16 minutes, when the percussions start to drum around the luminous chords of the keyboard in an improvised clan dance movement that flirts at times with jazz aromas and further on with a purely electronic universe proper to Michael Brückner's. Encore Rumpenheim continues the rhythmic improvisation started in the second part of The Rumpenheim Performance - Set 2. The structure is livelier and typical of these encores aiming at taking the audience out of the meditative trance of an EM designed to make us travel between its 4 visions.
Sylvain Lupari (04/04/22) ***½**
Available at Bridge to Imla Bandcamp