Tonband presents three works that grew out of the long association between the New York quartet Yarn/Wire and the team of Wolfgang Heiniger and Enno Poppe. Written for two pianists and two percussionists, with keyboards, electric organs and live electronics, the pieces range from explosive rhythm to the dark sound of old horror films. All three are first recordings made in studio conditions.
Yarn/Wire was founded in New York in 2005 and is made up of two percussionists, Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg, and two pianists, Laura Barger and Ning Yu. Sam Torres handles the live electronics. Heiniger is a Swiss percussionist, composer and sound designer; Poppe, born in 1969, is a pianist, composer and conductor. The two have worked together for more than twenty years, a collaboration that also produced Rad, Arbeit and Rundfunk. The album was made with the support of the Kunststiftung NRW.
The title piece, Tonband (2008/2012), for two percussionists, two keyboards and live electronics, is a joint work: Poppe composed the first two movements and Heiniger the last three. It is indebted to Stockhausen's Kontakte of 1958-60 for piano, percussion and four-track electronics, but it also refers to rock music and takes an uninhibited approach to melody. Poppe's Feld for two pianos and two percussionists is the most explosively rhythmic music he had written so far, extremely hard for the players and highly expressive. Where Bartók used the pianos for percussive effects in his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion of 1937, Poppe treats the percussion instruments as extended pianos.
Heiniger's Neumond (New Moon, 2018), for two keyboards played as electric organs and two percussionists, places historic organ sounds in a constantly shifting tonal space. The piece was written in the wake of the work on Tonband, as was Feld, so that the album traces how one collaboration fed the next. It is part of Wergo's series devoted to Poppe's music, in which Heiniger also appears as the author of the audio software for Rundfunk (WER 7388 2).
CD, Wergo WER 7398 2, released in 2021 in the Edition Enno Poppe series, first recordings, total time 65'10".
