Vienna FLAMMeS, or: The noise of these post-jazz improvisers resounds from paradise. According to a widespread cliché, improvisation in jazz is supposed to help promote the free play of the imagination. It was the Viennese flugelhorn player Franz Koglmann who vehemently contradicted the image of the naively self-actualizing jazz musician. As a composer of cerebral “cool” pieces, whose melancholy sprang from a razor-sharp analysis of his own means of expression, Koglmann was the most qualified person imaginable to critically judge the picking of the same old grapes. What could be observed was the return of the similar as something almost identical in the jazz that was usually heard: using the same kind of “free” patterns and broken-blown techniques.
For almost a year and a half now, the jazz heir to the Second Viennese School (Berg, Schoenberg, etc.) has been playing with a group of Austrian non- or seldom-jazz musicians. What they have worked out together is optional. It echoes off the glass walls that enclose the “Central Garden” on Vienna’s Danube Canal, an
excursion restaurant that has proven itself as an urban meeting place for no-longer-hipsters. What they have been hearing and seeing since 2024 represents a breaking of conventions from within, a kind of caring revolution. It is instigated in changing constellations by five male and two female musicians who do not play jazz, although they seize its numerous promises of freedom by the scruff of the neck and take the tone. Vienna FLAMMeS is an improv troupe. Their name is an acronym formed from the first names of the participants. It is Salzburg composer Michael Mautner who most closely resembles the role of a spiritus rector in the ensemble.
Mautner provides the motifs. The others follow him into the thicket of sound like clockwork, led by the fabulous drummer Lukas Schiske. In real life, this filigree technician plays multiple percussion for the Klangforum Wien. There he works on behalf of New Music, which is otherwise said to have a certain minor importance of the pulse (“time”). Vienna FLAMMeS He Said Boler o’ Everything that Vienna FLAMMeS achieves together is recorded and neatly labeled in the archive. According to his idea, this resembles Jorge Luis Borges’ library. It contains everything that the interaction of free, creative people, or musicians, makes possible. The music of Vienna FLAMMeS is post- jazz: the treacherous prefix “post” could be replaced by ‘pre’ at any time. In this pool of like-minded people, perfectly egalitarian conditions prevail, which is why the enervating urge to “break” every structure is confidently dispensed with from the outset. They open their ears to each other and against each other. Afterwards, they don’t stab each other in the back, but symbolically fall into each other’s arms. Those who want to can be reminded of the early Soft Machine by Vienna FLAMMeS’ sound weaving, or even of the progressive Canterbury music of the colorful, hallucinogenic early ‘70s. One or two sound sequences might have suited the old improv heroes of Henry Cow. The occasional outbursts on Sylvia Deixler’s guitar are inspired by Sonny Sharrock’s grandiose scrubbing.
And then there’s a rock groove. It results from Andreas Donhauser’s bass attacks, who also spits out syllables and, when the mood strikes him, marks the expulsion of blood-curdling “screams” with a shrill trumpet. Added to this are Max Bühlmann’s sonorous, almost bucolic interjections on the bass clarinet or
saxophone. And we haven’t yet mentioned Sylvie Rohrer’s exuberant vocal interventions – modulations of a Burgtheater lady who chirps at conventions. The freedom that Vienna FLAMMeS strives for through their patient practice is based on an ethos of empowerment, and this is akin to a peace treaty. Chaos, to paraphrase Brecht, has been exhausted. It was a good time. This results in memories, but ones like those Walter Benjamin knew. The fruits of a “mémoire involontaire,” taste impressions like those after enjoying a tartlet in the shape of a fan-shaped scallop shell dipped in tea. So it is written in the first chapter of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Franz Koglmann’s tone sequences, which never seem to break off, are made of this most precious of all materials. They function as commentaries on the current soundscape,
influenced by Chet Baker’s “cool,” by Miles Davis’s shorthand, and yet remain unmistakably Koglmann’s.
They are overpaintings, as if loud musical-graphological signs were applied to the restless sound surface of FLAMMeS. On theother hand, they seem to have emerged from a sphere of the pre-conscious, a message in a bottle, a biscuit dipped in tea. Triggers of loud “involuntary autobiographical memories” (IAM),
as science calls them. The massive sound waves piled up by the Vienna FLAMMeS roll in from paradise." - Ronald Pohl
