Eine Olive des Nichts is a poetry album built like a radio piece. The radio author and director Burkhard Reinartz works with poems and prose by Adam Zagajewski, Tomas Tranströmer and Philippe Jaccottet, read in German. Around the voices runs a continuous stream of sound made from recordings in the ECM catalogue. Within that stream the three poets also speak, in short statements, about what poetry means to them. The result avoids the stiffness of a conventional reading with background music.
Reinartz conceived and produced the album, composed the connecting soundscapes and reads the texts with Anja Lais and Bruno Winzen. It was recorded in August 2013 at Rheinklang Tonstudio in Cologne, where Alexander Hardt handled recording and sound design. The texts come from published German translations from Polish, Swedish and French, by Karl Dedecius, Hanns Grössel and others. The musical sources run across the label's history, from Arvo Pärt and Morton Feldman to Eivind Aarset, Jon Balke, Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, Meredith Monk, Tomasz Stańko and many more.
The seven tracks, each between eight and fifteen minutes, are named after poems and flow without breaks between voice and music. Im Nildelta sets Zagajewski and Tranströmer against electronics by Christian Fennesz, the duo Food and a passage of Feldman. Die Stimme belongs almost entirely to Jaccottet, with David Darling's cello threading through the readings. The closing Schneesturm, the longest piece at fourteen and a half minutes, moves from Pärt to the Stefano Battaglia Trio and Jon Hassell's trumpet, with all three poets taking turns.
In Der Standard, Alexander Kluy described how Reinartz combines and cuts across the poems with music "von pochend bis meditativ, von Stromgitarre bis gestopfte Trompete" (from pounding to meditative, from electric guitar to muted trumpet). He called the disc "eine Art ECM-Quintessenz" and one of the year's finest poetry productions. Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews placed it between two other label projects. One is Re: ECM by Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer, which stretches label samples into ambient washes; the other is Christian Reiner's bare Hölderlin readings on Turmgedichte.
This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM New Series 2435, first released in 2015. The spoken texts are in German, and the booklet reprints the translations with Reinartz's notes in German.
