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ARTIST
TITLE
Mauerharfe
FORMAT
CD
LABEL
CATALOG #
MARMO 002CD
MARMO 002CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
11/8/2019
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Günter Schickert, krautrock maestro of echo-driven psychedelia, returns on Marmo Music one-year-and-half after the release of the Labyrinth LP (MARMO 001LP, 2018). Mauerharfe consists of old and special material, which has officially never seen the light before. Berlin, August 1990, first post-wall Summer. Two friends, the locals Günter Schickert and gallerist Peter Unsicker perform a spectacular yet symbolically intimate interpretation of those epochal changing days by building a sound installation with a damaged piece of the Berlin Wall. They persuade the patrol "Feliks Dzierzynski" of the DDR army to transport and relocate a piece outside Peter's Wall Street Gallery on the Zimmer Strasse, in the borough of Mitte, where only a few months back the intact structure actually passed through. Once the wall was positioned, they bend down the bars of the iron structure that crop out the concrete, bind piano chords to them, stretch the strings down to the bodom base of the construct and connect guitar amplifiers to the set up. The Berlin Wall is ready to be played as a harp. Günter Schickert's Mauerharfe are executed between August and October 1990, resulting into three long field recordings. "Aufnahme bei Mauerblüten, Sommer 1990" features a 19-minute long piece. The tape-induced background noise lays down a carpet of haunting atmospheres and introduces the experiment. Günter starts to test the chords by pulling out, with his fingers, dry and acid timbers. The warm-up evolves by investigating wider sinusoidal waves and dilated metallic riffs. The track takes the form of a more conventional music narration, as the artist bangs the harp with a sort of rudimental violin bow creating marching percussive patterns. On "Zwei Spuren nacheinander aufgenommen, Herbst 1990", a similarly long take opens up with ferocious urge, like being catapulted into a warfare between iron and cement. As the strings get hit and pulled, the metal seems to crash into thousands of pieces, dissolving into merciless distortions. The third piece (CD-only), "Mauerharfe 3", is a 30-minute long performance dated August the 13th, 1990. As Schickert recalls, 29 years before exactly on that same date, the construction of the Berlin wall was accomplished. The recording is cleaner than the previous two, giving more width and definition to the sounds resulting in discrete and meditative, deep, gong-like percussive timbers. Includes exclusive pictures, liner notes, a prose poem by Peter Unsicker and some draft writings by the artists with reflections on the project.
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