DRAM News

 Austrian composer and trombonist, Radu Malfatti writes music that strips away the edifice of the composer and leaves what can, somewhat naively, be described as the purity of sound and silence.  His approach to composition is architectural, dealing with the basic building blocks of form, material, and structure in interesting new ways.  He describes these terms in an analogy from a 2001 interview on the website Paris Transatlantic (emphasis added).

“Take a house: the form is the overall shape of the building - e.g. round, square, long, high and narrow etc. The material is clear - wood, bricks, concrete (nice word in this context) etc. The structure would be the shapes, patterns, design, layout of the different rooms and spaces and their number, e.g. one big room, many small ones etc.

We could then accept the word ‘form’ to refer to sonatas, symphonies, 12-bar blues, ‘long’ pieces, ‘short’ pieces etc. ‘Material’ is a major scale, ‘in g-flat minor’, or Lachenmann's ‘Materialzertrümmerung’ (a kind of demolition, destruction of the old, well-known material), noises, scratching etc. ‘Structure’ would then stand for the density, spaciness etc.”

Malfatti works with these elements in a series of pieces that are featured on his own label, b-boim records, which DRAM proudly presents as one of its newest collections.  The works by Malfatti and some like-minded composers and collaborators, such as Jürg Frey and Michael Pisaro are intense studies in the construction of musical work through the confrontation of organized sound and the relative disorganization of silence in performance.  The easiest connection to make is to the composition of John Cage and Morton Feldman, Erik Satie and Thelonious Monk, but these works take that aesthetic to a new extreme. 

An excellent starting point for those new to Radu Malfatti’s music is the recording, Kid Ailack 5.  A series of tones are played by the composer on trombone, with performers on Baroque flute, guitar, mouth organ, and electronics.  Upon a focused listening, small sounds of the space and live audience become clear in the silences between the harmonies, although even those hold a surprise for the attentive listener.

This is music that comes in a series.  Again, an easy connection to make, although perhaps not the most exact one, would be to the visual work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.  Like their minimalist paintings, subtle differences in the use of material, form, and structure provide the patient and focused viewer/listener with a rewarding insight to a truly progressive art.  Malfatti’s compositions follow a similar aesthetic, but when listened to as a group, they reveal a patient and rigorous reworking of these three elements to create astoundingly fresh musical work.