Black immure: music from the casa of serralves janek schaefer | sirr010

a remarkable example that researches the relation between sound and architecture
geometric bolletin


Subtly shifting colors over extended sequences, caked in a glacial freeze
that thaws with hard cracks and pops within the ice floes, turntablist Janek
Schaefer’s latest album Black Immure is a work that requires intense
concentration to appreciate its many intricate pleasures. The album is a
live recording of a piece composed specifically for the old mansion in which
it was performed, and the Portuguese casa’s reverb-laden atmosphere
surrounds this music like a dampening fog, enclosing on all sides. The music
inspires claustrophobia, inviting images of darkened corridors and nighttime
gardens draped with moonlit mist. There is a skewed Romanticism to
Schaefer’s drones and hiss, a nostalgia that seems embedded into the persona
of the vinyl deconstructionist despite the modern methods of Schaefer and
his many kindred souls. This Romantic spirit is the beating heart and
driving force behind Black Immure, an hour-long continuous work divided
almost arbitrarily into 12 movements for the CD release. Schaefer’s primary
tool is, as ever, his custom-designed turntable, here playing records he
found in a Portuguese shop before the concert. But this prerecorded musical
element rarely ever enters too prominently into the proceedings. Even more
so than his closest counterpart, Philip Jeck, Schaefer is unconcerned with
the actual music encoded onto the vinyl he collects. These records are sound
sources for him, raw materials to be tweaked and manipulated until they
conform to the essential function of the piece at hand. For Black Immure,
Schaefer has crafted a subtle, dense sea of sound, with staticky waves
churning over distant classical strings or charmingly upbeat melodies. The
turntablist also incorporates field recordings he made of the old casa’s
piano, which add an eerie sense of place and time to the proceedings. The
sixth track, which features Schaefer’s plaintive, minimalist piano
reverberating beneath a pristine surface of drones and distant rhythmic
clattering, is one of the best here, achieving a delicacy and emotional
resonance not heard quite as effectively on the rest of the album. Which is
not to say that the rest isn’t excellent, too. The first five tracks build
logically towards this halfway mark, ebbing and flowing from calm stasis to
chaotic outbursts and back again with a deceptive ease. After the sixth
track’s moment of transcendence, the music slowly winds back into itself,
swallowing choirs and pianos whole into the near-silence of a primeval
heartbeat or the slow lapping of a wave upon the shoreline. Schaefer’s
quietude never works against him; despite being a live performance, this all
seems very planned, very natural in its subtle transitions and shifts in
mood. The tonal transformations are always striking and surprising, and
always timed perfectly so that the piece’s overall moody consistency doesn’t
become overbearing. As the music gently wends its way onward, it alternately
evokes the dread of night, the playfulness of children and the feeling of
walking down an ancient street in old historic Europe. Schaefer’s meditative
vinyl patchwork is as full of variety and life as these snapshot impressions
would seem to indicate, stretching far beyond the specific locale where it
was recorded. That’s why the evolving tapestry of sound emanating from
Schaefer’s turntables evokes this kind of connection even without its
original context of the darkened space where it was recorded. The disc
closes with the sound of applause -- apparently, recorded while Schaefer had
already fled the building, allowing the music to fade away of its own
accord. It’s an appropriate symbolic close to the preceding hour, music and
creator both departing together like ghosts into the night.
Ed Howard, Stylus Magazine


It's beautifully packaged, with a cover that uses black & white photographs by
Mr. Schaefer. Since the concert took place before an audience enveloped in
darkness, this cd 'ought' to be played in the dark as well.
pv, DMA


One of a new generation of experimental turntablists, Janek Schaefer came to
prominence for his custom-built, tri-phonic turntable, which he routes
through various effects in performances that summon a druggy, slo-mo
Plunderphonic haze out of sad scraps of discarded vinyl.Black Immure
certainly doesnt lack any sense of architectural scale. Yawning chasms of
echo and massive sheets of almost impenetrable drone actually evoke a space
far older, and grander, than any Modernist construction, instead summoning
images of fortresses, barren plains, interminable corridors, and bottomless
pits. Slow, molten string passages flow over jagged percussion figures.
Reverb-laden piano chords float out of the ether like echoes of a parlor
from a century ago. Tungsten-bright high tones worm out of the corners of
the room, like a tea-kettle keyed to the buildings resonant frequency.
Everything slowly churns, as though the building were sloughing off years of
lived history at a glaciers pace, shedding everything -- meals,
conversations, births and deaths and restless nights in a final process of
dissolution. Composed seemingly on the fly, no sense of structure orders the
piece. Instead, slowly winding passages of strings and creaking percussion
blur together, creating the impression of a vast maze within which one has
become utterly lost.
Philip Sherburne, the Wire magazine


The electronic aspect of "Black Immure" follows a similar path as his last
couple of records "Pulled Under" and "Le Petit Theatre De Mercelis," with
divergent currents of mysterious sounds abstracted into innumerably bleak
surfaces. Schaefer punctuates his atmospheres with looped samples from those
old records and the piano recordings, using a technique similar to Philip
Jeck's, crafting those sonatas into oblique fragments of memory that have
been faded beyond all recognition."Black Immure" is an impressive piece of
work.
aquarius records, san francisco


Schaefer's complex and intriguing works have crossed here twice before
(2001_17, 2002_08) as have the Portuguese Sirr label a couple of times. This
release presents a concert from the Casa de Serralves in the Museu de Arte
Contemporanea Serralves combining sounds recorded in the building and
grounds, a piano and locally purchased disk, captured live. The concert has
been sectioned into 12 parts. In his notes, Schaefer tells us he closed the
blinds around the room, immersing (immure = enclose) the audience in
darkness. I think you can here this, a trundling clatter, but it also
suggests the best way to listen to the piece ‹ closely and yet allowing
yourself to flow with it. There are many changes and moods to the work ‹
shifting into percussive banging crescendo; tones and noises drifting
across, brief passages of music from the disks or longer times as they loop
and become the focus, generally a light orchestral or folkloric tone; vinyl
crackles and sounds probably from inside the piano; a movement where the
piano is played; tones whistling shimmers pulse; a bouncing ball sample;
rain machines breathing birds; meditative exciting excited edgy; it rises
and falls, ebbs and flows. Typical of the more intricate and closely worked
pieces, very hard to describe ‹ a moment by moment run down would not
capture the delicacy and entrancement. The fourth, for example: light shaker
rhythms increasing with a piano loop, perhaps rain, rising and falling,
buzzing machines develop over and a jolly sample; seventh ‹ fuller piano and
swelling buzz, meditative, buzzing builds at times then to a light shimmer,
a high squeak. Ten, maybe: long tones and whistling, moody, stage music
ringing buzz; fluttering clutter, rings rumbles, tones, light orchestral
develops into throbbing tone, lots of movement (opening blinds?) All that I
can do is highly recommend this lovely album, which would close an evening
as beautifully as it has this issue.
&etc webzine, Australia


The latest on Portugese label, Sirr.ecords is Janek's Schaefer's
phonographic swan song. This live recording begs to be played in the dark
with its dramatic edges, dips and sparse dusty corners. If you threw this
disc into the ocean it would most definitely float to the surface of the
currents. It floats with an eerie determination. Experiments with piano and
other foreign sound samples, there seems to be a wealth of gadgetry tossed
about subtly herein. At times a ghostly heirloom soundtrack to faded
familial memories, contorted by time, driven by the urgency of discovery to
dig past the surface. There is perhaps a parade that's gone by, in its wake
having left a chronicle of its pomp and circumstance. We are only allowed to
experience through another's memory. This recording could easily be
illustrated by the visual works of Christian Boltanski, in its quiet moments
only the echoes of structure have been faintly illuminated. The mysterious
and effective black and white cover design was created by M. Behrens
depicting imagery [photographed by Janek] from the performance site [and
Cuba] with a digitized background. Schaefer builds a narrative for a world
gone mad by salvaging its bare remnants.

Vital Weekly, TJ Norris


"Black immure" is yet another great piece of new music by the always
improving London based turntablist/composer. Though most of the sounds come
- as usual - from vinyl records played by the author on modified machines,
here we're treated to various grades of concrete sounds, mostly made by
Janek himself while "preparing" the audience to be blinded by obscurity in
the villa where the action takes place. Speaking of the overall result, the
music is as always very beautiful, tending to grey-to-dark tonalities, full
of looping and glissando slow motions, spiralling the listeners into trance
and void. At the end, Janek can be heard running away from the scene,
leaving the people "comfortably numb" until the sound becomes silence and
the final applause closes the performance. What a smart exit!
Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes


Equal parts sound installation, conceptual composition and live performance,
'Black Immure' was presented at the Casa de Serralves in Porto, Portugal on
June 29, 2002. A luxurious location in all aspects, the Casa is said to have
a fantastic natural reverb and sits among the landscaped gardens of the
Museu de Arte Contemporanea Serralves. Janek Schaefer decided to use both of
these elements for a site-specific piece. Prior to the performance he has
recorded various sounds in the building, including a few melodies on the
Steinway piano. During the performance he mixed those with electronics and
records he found in a Portuguese thrift shop. The title comes from the fact
that he also shut blinds and windows as the music progressed, trapping the
audience into darkness. As the music evaporated on its own, he ran into the
gardens, leaving the applause providing the coda for the work. The music
remains very ambient throughout the hour of its duration, oscillating
between orchestrated field recordings and atmospheric vinyl treatments. Some
passages are a bit awkward, especially when Schaefer introduces vinyl quotes
in a more direct manner -- they interrupt the mood. Otherwise, he put the
natural reverb to good use. He seems to approach the location with the
utmost respect, which translates into music of an almost ceremonial nature,
calm and immersive. Very different from his shorter, composed pieces, this
improvisation is somewhat gentler on the listener, even though it requires a
longer attention span.
All Music Guide, François Couture


Janek has the ability to create some really magnificent soundscapes that
capture you since the first 'drone' heard of them in an oneiric journey,
such as this one.
Absurd, Greece

Eén woord voor deze ‘Black Immure’: sfeer! Deze memorabele registratie werd
op een tropische avond opgenomen in het Museu de Arte Contemporana Serraives in Porto. Schaefer creëert een onaardse ambiance en doet prachtige dingen met zijn driearmige platendraaier, met een antieke piano, met licht en
geluid tijdens die exotische, Portugese nacht. Sneu!
Peter Wollen (FAVOURITES OF 2003)


Esta é a gravação do memorável concerto que Janek Schaefer realizou na Casa
de Serralves (Porto) no ano passado (2002). Durante a sua actuação, o músico
britânico utilizou os sons dos edifícios de Serralves, incluindo o do Museu
de Arte Contemporânea, e dos jardins circundantes, para além de alguns
discos de música portuguesa (os gira-discos continuam a ser o seu
' instrumento' principal) e de registos dele próprio ao piano. Preocupado com
a dimensão arquitectural da música que executa ao vivo, Schaefer diz ter
tocado fisicamente o espaço desta sua primeira apresentação em Portugal.
Ao longo da „performance, janelas e portas foram-se fechando até o público
ficar na mais completa escuridão ('immure' quer dizer encarcerar), para no
final a luz só regressar com a sua saída do local. Quem não esteve presente
e ouvir agora este disco não ficará, obviamente, com uma ideia completa do
que lá aconteceu, mas as imagens sonoras aqui contidas são suficientes para
despertar a imaginação. E é como dizem alguns psiquiatras infantis: os
desenhos animados da televisão e do cinema só contribuem para a menorização
imaginativa da criança, pois o acto de imaginar vai sempre mais longe, pelo
menos teoricamente, do que a realidade (às vezes esta surpreende-nos). Com o
velamento da sala, Schaefer quis substituir o espaço físico em questão por
outro, não propriamente impondo uma deslocalização mas convidando os
assistentes a inventarem um outro espaço enquadrado dentro daquele, tudo
isto por meio dos sons que ouviam e da incorpórea arquitectura construída
por estes. Muito interessante, e completamente diferente de outras obras
deste autor.
Rui Eduardo Paes, JL


La electroacœstica vuelve a ser la receta utilizaba por Janek Schaefer en
sus producciones. En esta ocasi—n el escenario elegido para la toma de
sonidos ha sido la portuguesa Casa de Serralves, pr—xima a Oporto. El
inefable productor pas— tres d’as captando con micr—fonos de ambiente los
m‡s diversos sonidos (incluso de "portazos" o del propio viento) de este
edificio vanguardista y el resultado se muestra todav’a m‡s experimental que
en su anterior y todav’a muy pr—ximo trabajo "Pulled Under" (tan cercano que
tan s—lo hace unos d’as pudisteis verlo comentado en estas l’neas). La
principal peculiaridad reside en el acompa–amiento que en muchas de las
piezas realiza el propio Janek valiZ¹ndose de su piano Steinway, logrando
as’ dotar al minutaje de una particular e inquietante impronta. Merece la
pena escucharlo.
Beat People webzine, Jose Manuel Cisneros