| The "Gitarrenarmee" (guitar army)
does not stand for militarism, not even for discipline. The ensemble is
a free union, which exists more in the heads of the four musicians than
in the real music landscape. The term army becomes contradicted with the
fact, that it is not a "firmly standing army", but a quartet made
up of very different characters with very different ideas. No musical piece
resembles an other, no live-set is performed twice. The "Raum-Klang-Installation"
(three-dimensional sound installation), which happened in Leipzig in 1990,
forms the first high point. The experience is a volatile - with the fading
of the last sound the concept is history and continues to live only in the
heads of the then present listeners, just as the governmental system of
the GDR. When Darjush Davar listens to the finished music for the first
time, he denies that the Gitarrenarmee played certain passages. Indeed "Composing
after Playing" is a computer product. From a two-day-recording-session
Christoph Abée extracts very different passages, which in their inspiration
span from Robert Fripps "Crafty Guitarists" up to Neil Youngs
"Dead Man". Listening, cutting and pasting make up for a strongly
compressed sound world, which could have neither be composed before playing
nor be performed at all by four guitars at once. Two concepts of working,
which usually fear to get in contact with each other, are combined: sampling
and remixing from the world of electronic music with the free flow from
jazz, fusion and psychedelic. The result resembles something a "Memory
play" - with the crucial difference that the individual motives and
their mating are not made clear. Each motive from "Composing after
Playing" unfolds and changes its character when combined with the next
motive. Now and then apparently well-known motives emerge again, get changed
within the new context and will be replaced by completely different motives.
"Composing after Playing" nevertheless simply wants to be just
music, which functions without intellectual background or the knowledge
of the listener around its emergence. In this sense the guitar army wishes
much fun when hearing a musical work that the four musicians would have
never been able to compose or to play. Thanks to Dominik Sroka for its technical
support. Hannover, October 2006 |
