Michael Wollny - Nachtfahrten (CD)

Release Date: 10/09/15

“Michael Wollny is making some impressive and artful noise in the realm of the new piano trio tradition” DOWNBEAT

Darkness is at the core of German pianist Michael Wollny`s album “Nachtfahrten”, the title of which can be translated as “night journeys”. It is music of steady state rather than of development. These are sounds that hover, which spread like ripples. Improvisation, as it is known from the jazz tradition, with its logical processes for developing solos, has been put aside in favour of something else. The shaping of melody, the conventional conversations within a piano trio are replaced by sounds which develop layer by layer. Wollny here is casting light onto “Neon Nocturnes,” he is developing sound pictures with a strong character of their own, finding natural resonances in darkness. He is not just asking questions that remain open, he is ensuring that they lead to new and ever more interesting questions. Wollny takes the listener to recognizably fictitious locations. Each one becomes the pretext for a new “Nachtfahrt” (Night Journey): Twin Peaks, the Bates Hotel from Hitchcock's Psycho, the valley of the castles from Edgar Allan Poe's early story “Metzengerstein”. Making this disconnect from reality is a subtle way to prepare the listener for the discontinuities. What drives Wollny here is a conscious desire to create complex ambivalence, as he juxtaposes what appear on the surface to be quite simple motifs. This is a process which Wollny has discovered and developed for this album. A possible source of inspiration here is the music of Chris Beier, with whom Michael Wollny studied. At that time Beier was starting to suffer from focal dystonia, a severe condition which takes away muscle memory. Beier was obliged to write out and to prepare his music bar by bar. His playing became perceptibly hestitant and fragmentary, but at the same time translucent, pared down and incredibly intense. “I found the way he played had a devastating effect on me,” remembered Wollny. This method of intense paring-down runs right through “Nachtfahrten” from the first note to the last.