Calabi.Yau ~ Joseph Suchy

I’ve just been listening to this on impulse for the first time in some months and I’m very much enjoying it. I’m struck by the mysteriousness of the enterprise, the oddness of the titling (Calabi.Yau; Su-Um; Ka-Asam; Moo-Ay; By-Baa; Soan-Ne; Uum-U; Kaalay; Kaon-On), the visual design (a pristinely sexy recumbent female in period astronaut gear) and most of all, of course, the music itself. Joseph Suchy is a German guitarist whose only other work I’m aware of is his contributions to a number of Burnt Friedman’s projects. There’s an attractively remote sense to Calabi.Yau, as if Suchy’s referents were outside my frame of reference (more than possible of course!) The music appears to mix acoustic sounds, analogue electronics and glitches with delicate acoustic and electric guitar work. There’s a feeling of free improvisation combining in gentle freefall, the sum of its parts ordered from a great height that affords a particularly macro compositional approach (like spying the shape of the land from high altitude). It coasts – or floats – free of any rhythm except that of successive, often gorgeous, passages suffused with impressive amounts of textural detail. The title track in particular is a thing of delicate, alien beauty. Calabi.Yau resists assimilation, always a good thing in my book, while proffering a sense of the familiar made strange. I can’t think of much in a similar vein, but it does suggest to me scenes from Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies (and concommitantly Eduard Artemyev’s soundtracks), notably the lengthy examination of the Breughel painting and the trip into the city in Solaris and a less well-remembered scene where a boy stands on the incline of a hill looking out over a snowy landscape.

The cover of the cd bears a poetic text (attributed to Knut Erik Franzen) that upon rereading goes a little way to validating my observations:

Come to madeira with me, weltraumgirl, if everything caves in, we’ll no longer be able to depend on external supply. We left the capsule long ago: heimat reloaded. It smells of synthetic incense. Cautious steps. So artificial moonlight and the coolness of stars up for auction. An equivalence of energies. Cautious steps in a sea of paralllels. Immersed in white. Where is the pilot? Search and search. No echo-sounder, no chronicle of stable feelings. Another complete check up. A whispering of theories. A rush of memory, a thrill of anamnesis. Violated spaces, dimensions of hope. The indifferent way the seconds well up, cracks in the concrete of time. The wounded walls break open.