ECM New Series: A Compendium

| Tyran Grillo

“I can imagine the New Series in the form of a journey: there is a route mapped out, but it is open to contingency; it does not insist on the shortest or most direct road. It allows for detours that might lead into totally different areas from the original plan.”
–Manfred Eicher

There exists a particular sensibility in recorded music that refuses spectacle, distrusts haste, and listens for what emerges only when attention is sustained. It is an ethos built on patience, on the belief that sound is not merely an event but an environment and that listening is as much a moral as an aesthetic act. Within this sensibility, music is not asked to announce itself loudly or justify its presence through novelty or authority. Instead, it is allowed to exist in a state of becoming. The Compendium at hand arises from this worldview. It does not rush to explain or persuade. It invites the reader into a space where time slows, where artistic intent is inseparable from restraint, and where the deepest meanings are often carried by what is nearly imperceptible.

Producer Manfred Eicher understands classical music not as a fixed inheritance but as a living terrain shaped by memory, silence, and risk. It softens the rigid hierarchies that separate genres, eras, and disciplines, favoring instead a continuity that flows between medieval chant and contemporary composition, between written score and spontaneous intuition, between the concert hall and the solitary act of listening. The guiding conviction is that music’s truth lies not in classification but in presence. How a note is played, how a phrase is allowed to decay, how a recording captures air, distance, and stillness matters more than the lineage of the material itself. The book emerges as an artifact of this conviction, shaped by the same attention to space, texture, and inwardness that has long defined the sound world it chronicles. It stands not as a monument but as a threshold, inviting readers into a cinematic way of hearing.

To situate this volume properly requires a widening of perspective, an understanding of how recorded classical music has historically been framed and mediated. For much of the 20th century, the dominant classical record labels functioned as custodians of authority. Houses such as Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, and Philips constructed a sonic canon through monumental interpretations, star conductors, and a reverence for definitive statements. Their achievements were immense and lasting, yet their aesthetic tended toward the architectural. Performances were designed to stand as reference points, recordings as polished monuments to permanence, history rendered stable and self-assured.

Against this backdrop, the New Series emerged not in opposition but in quiet divergence. Under the wider umbrella of ECM Records, it proposed a fundamentally different relationship between music, performer, and listener. Classical music was no longer approached as a preserved inheritance to be polished and displayed but as a living continuum, shaped by fragility, curiosity, and permeability. The New Series allowed sound to be influenced by poetry, film, sacred ritual, folk memory, and contemporary abstraction without anxiety over category or lineage. It invited unfamiliar accents into familiar forms and treated unfamiliar forms with the same care traditionally reserved for the canon.

The Compendium mirrors this orientation with remarkable fidelity. Its structure resists hierarchy, favoring proximity over ranking, conversation over proclamation. Rather than reinforcing the idea of repertoire as a fixed body of works to be mastered, it presents classical music as an ongoing exchange among composers, performers, and listeners across time and geography. Each page represents a frame in a larger, evolving montage. In doing so, the book articulates a philosophy that classical music remains most vital when it is allowed to remain unfinished, receptive, and alive.

At the center of this vision stands Eicher, not as a figure of authority in the conventional sense but as a listener whose curatorial instinct has quietly reshaped the conditions under which music comes into being. His words from a 1986 interview provide more than an epigraph for this review. They function as its axis. When he describes the New Series as a journey with a mapped route that remains open to contingency, he gestures toward an understanding of artistic practice that values deviation as deeply as intention. Progress is not measured by efficiency or arrival but by attentiveness to what reveals itself along the way, detours the very means through which meaning is discovered.

This conception of music as an exploratory act underlies every page of this volume. One senses its affinities with interior monologues, the long take in cinema, the negative space of modern painting, and the instinctive pacing of the stage. Music, in this framework, does not exist in isolation. It absorbs light, text, gesture, and silence, allowing each to subtly alter its contour. The Compendium reflects this sensibility without didacticism. It does not attempt to persuade through argument or analysis. Its structure mirrors the listening experience the New Series has long cultivated, where coherence arises gradually, and conviction emerges not from assertion but from accumulated attention.

The journey begins, with a sense of inevitability rather than chronology, in Arvo Pärt. His music, austere yet luminous, does more than inaugurate the New Series. It establishes a gravity field around which much of what follows seems to orbit. Pärt’s work reintroduced stillness as a radical force in modern music, restoring silence as something charged with ethical and spiritual weight. Thus, the label’s deeper preoccupations with time, devotion, and resonance come into focus.

From there, the book proceeds composer by composer, each chapter opening onto a distinct interior landscape while remaining visibly connected to a larger constellation. Figures such as György Kurtág, Giya Kancheli, Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov, Alexander Knaifel, and Veljo Tormis are presented not as representatives of national schools or stylistic movements but as participants in a shared inquiry into memory, loss, and the fragility of form. Many of these composers write music that feels as though it is listening backward, attentive to echoes of vanishing traditions, while remaining unmistakably contemporary. Their work often proceeds by subtraction rather than accumulation, trusting sparse gestures, broken phrases, and restrained dynamics to carry emotional and historical weight.

Taken together, these composers suggest an alternative modernism, one less concerned with rupture or provocation than with remembrance and inwardness. Their music asks how history survives in sound, how trauma, exile, and cultural erosion might be transmuted into quiet persistence. The Compendium allows these affinities to emerge organically, without forcing comparison, inviting the reader to sense the shared temperature of their work over technical minutiae.

The scope widens further with composers whose practices actively dissolve the boundaries between genres and disciplines. Heinz Holliger and Heiner Goebbels bring to the New Series a heightened theatrical and literary awareness, where music becomes inseparable from text, gesture, and spatial experience. Their contributions underscore the label’s openness to works that exist as events rather than objects. In a different but equally expansive way, Meredith Monk articulates an aesthetic grounded in directness, purity, asymmetry, and transparency. Her music, born of the physicality of the voice and the ceremony of performance, seems to distill the label’s approach into human breath and movement, reminding us that experimentation need not sacrifice intimacy.

Alongside these figures stand composers such as Gavin Bryars, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Thomas Larcher, Dobrinka Tabakova, and Eleni Karaindrou, whose work stands slightly askew from prevailing trends. Their music is neither doctrinaire nor opportunistic. It operates according to an inner necessity, attentive to lyricism, atmosphere, and emotional clarity without yielding to sentimentality. The New Series has provided a home for such voices precisely because it values conviction over conformity, allowing composers to develop long arcs of work free from the pressures of fashion or institutional expectations.

The presence of each is deepened by carefully chosen quotations reflecting on the act of composition itself, paired with portrait photographs and images from recording sessions. These reveal the human conditions under which their creations come into being, the solitude, concentration, doubt, and patience required to bring sound into focus. One senses the rehearsal room, the studio, the long hours of listening and adjustment. In this way, the book affirms one of its central truths: that modern music, at its most vital, is not an abstract system but a lived practice, shaped by time, attention, and the enduring vulnerability of those who make it.

Equally vital to this story are the performers, whose interpretations run through the New Series in quiet refrain. They are not presented as virtuoso personalities imposing themselves upon the music but as mediators who allow its inner logic to speak with clarity and force. Their artistry lies in restraint as much as command.

Artists such as Gidon Kremer, András Schiff, and Kim Kashkashian exemplify this ethic through an almost ascetic devotion to sound itself. Their performances are marked by transparency of texture and a shedding of rhetorical excess, allowing even the most fragile or fragmentary music to retain its integrity. In the case of Keith Jarrett, whose presence bridges the worlds of improvisation and composed music, the New Series reveals how attentiveness can dissolve distinctions between genres, bringing the same intensity of listening to both the written score and being in the moment. Conductors such as Dennis Russell Davies further extend this approach, shaping large forms with a sensitivity to balance and pacing that privileges inner coherence over outward drama.

The ensemble performances documented in the Compendium deepen this perspective. Groups like The Hilliard Ensemble and Trio Mediaeval bring centuries-old repertoire into dialogue with contemporary composition, revealing unexpected continuities across time through their vocal blend and disciplined stillness. The Danish String Quartet exemplifies how chamber music, when approached with collective intelligence and trust, can achieve a rare balance of precision and vulnerability. In these performances, risk is not theatrical but structural, emerging from the willingness to expose the music’s quietest tensions.

Together, these musicians embody the New Series ideal, where lucidity replaces polish and attentiveness supplants display. Their work suggests that, at its highest level, performance is morally shaped. The Compendium honors them not as interpreters of a fixed tradition but as active participants in a living one, reminding us that the future of classical music depends as much on how it is experienced in the moment as on the notes preserved on the page.

As a physical object, the Compendium embodies the visual and tactile intelligence that has long distinguished ECM’s aesthetic. Its design speaks in a measured voice, austere yet quietly radiant, disciplined without austerity for its own sake. White space is not an absence but a field of attention. Typography, sequencing, and image placement appear calibrated to slow the reader’s pace, encouraging a form of engagement that mirrors the label’s decades-long listening habits. One does not skim this book. One dwells within it, returning to pages as one might return to a recording, attentive to shifts of mood and emphasis that only reveal themselves over time.

In this way, the book becomes an extension of the recordings themselves, another site where listening is shaped by care. It aligns with an idea of art that does not rush to occupy the foreground but waits for the reader or listener to meet it halfway. The reward for this patience is depth, not as density of information but as depth of presence.

In the end, ECM New Series: A Compendium stands as far more than an anniversary publication or institutional summation. It is a sustained meditation on how classical music might remain fully alive in the present without forfeiting its inwardness or historical gravity. By expanding the very conditions under which music is performed, recorded, and heard, the New Series has quietly altered the expectations surrounding classical sound. It has shown that innovation need not announce itself loudly, that progress can unfold through refinement, patience, and a deepening of attention.

This book captures that achievement with a humility that feels inseparable from its subject. It neither proclaims a legacy nor attempts to fix it in place. Instead, it reflects a way of thinking about music as a continuing conversation with time, one that values listening as an act of openness rather than mastery. Like enduring works of literature and art, the New Series does not seek to dominate history or escape it. It listens to it, answers it, and leaves space for what has yet to arrive.

Dine Doneff: Roden Voden (neRED/6)

| Tyran Grillo

Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, mandola, tambura, piano, organ, percussion, and tapes
Kyriakos Gouventas violin on “Flow”
Main corpus of recordings: MK Studio, Munich
Müncher Kammerspiele – December 29, 2018
Engineer: Johann Jürgen Koch
Additional recordings: Vertekop Studio – 2019
Engineer: Pande Noushin
Mixed and edited by Dine Doneff
Domagk Cell 27, Munich – May 2025
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Cover artwork: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Dine Doneff

We Macedonians
will not live in fear
The time will come,
and we’ll sing
our old song, again.

Those lines run through Roden Voden like roots growing in the earth. They function neither as a slogan nor as a promise easily fulfilled, sounding instead as something learned under pressure, after history has already exacted its toll. In this sense, Dine Doneff’s concluding chapter in a trilogy that began with Nostos in 1995 and continued through Rousilvo in 2004 does not simply present music. It stages a reckoning. The album listens backward into time, gathering voices recorded between 1991 and 2009 in Rousilvo, Ostrovo, Ts’rnessovo, and Voden, Greece, and carries them forward into the present, where memory, erasure, and survival collide.

Macedonia’s modern history is marked by fragmentation, forced silences, renamings, and borders drawn without regard for the lives lived along them. Languages were pressured into retreat. Songs were sung quietly, or only at home, if at all. Roden Voden treats these conditions as active forces shaping every sound. Doneff’s original compositions do not dominate the archival material. They surround it, support it, and sometimes unsettle it, as though the music itself were asking how an inheritance scarred by violence can be carried without being embalmed.

The album opens its first vocal threshold with “Spell,” voiced and written by Vane Indiff (b. 1944). The poem abandons narrative in favor of invocation. Natural forces, measures of time, mythic presences, and ancestral peoples accumulate in a relentless cadence that feels closer to ritual than to verse. Language becomes a circle drawn to awaken a world that has been dispersed. The poem does not describe resurrection. It attempts it, using repetition and breath as tools of release.

Such ritual gravity strengthens with “Zhalaj me Majko,” sung by Slava Pop’va (b. 1927). This folk song unfolds as a quiet lament shaped by exile and unspoken longing. Its melody lilts and never fully settles, searching for reassurance of love in a land that does not recognize her. Addressed to a distant mother, the song carries the weight of a year spent loving in silence. Devotion here is intense but unseen, and by the final lines, it is no longer an emotion but a fatal condition. What remains is a spare, devastating cry that transforms private despair into communal mourning.

“Kirka,” another text by Indiff, fractures time and meaning even further. The poem constructs its logic from color, the everyday, and the body rather than from a story. An almost childlike order is established before being obliterated by the abrupt fact of death as the self is reduced to wood, fire, and branches. Innocence and physicality collide without romanticism. Loss is rendered through disjointed fragments that resist consolation, insisting instead on the rawness of what remains.

Collective tragedy takes center stage in “Dve Tri Poushki,” rendered by Neshka Ts’rnessova (b. 1925). The song distills catastrophe into stark repetition. Rifles are counted. Fallen youths are counted. Grieving mothers are counted. Loss is now the only measure, allowing the song to move from sudden violence toward an enduring lament that binds faith and pain.

The political heart of the album asserts itself most directly in “Censored Memory,” to which Doneff contributes percussion, strings, and a poem in Greek. At the center lies “Oj Lele Brate mi Tane,” a song about Tane Stojchev Kljandzev (1874-1907) from Gornitschevo, leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation in Lerin (Florina). Memory here is not merely fragile. It is actively suppressed. By layering languages, voices, and historical reference, the track refuses singular authority and exposes history as something perpetually contested, shaped as much by silence as by speech.

“Nubeti” returns to the terrain of intimate loss. The folk song that follows unfolds as a dialogue between generations. A young widow carries her wedding crown as a relic of happiness interrupted. The mother speaks in the cadence of continuity and social expectation, while the daughter rejects comfort, insisting on the singularity of her grief. Survival and fidelity are placed in quiet opposition, and the song refuses to resolve the tension between them.

“Prikazni” unfolds as a dense, dreamlike collage where landscape, memory, and lament bleed into one another. Mountains, lakes, and weather respond like wounded witnesses to human violence and erasure. Personal cries of love and death interrupt the natural imagery, giving way again to familial grief and village memory. The verses move by emotional association rather than linear sense, capturing a world fractured by loss, where love, labor, war, and dispossession sound together for both the living and the dead.

“Narrative” gathers three texts into a single arc. “Stojna,” voiced by Stojan Gjorgiff (b. 1913), compresses catastrophe into a stark moral tableau where reproach and irreversible action collide in a single breath. Its restraint leaves the listener suspended in an unresolved aftermath. “Stara Panoukla,” sung by T’rpa Tanva Noushna (b. 1905), begins with pastoral tenderness before revealing a plague disguised as an old woman, death entering through the most ordinary gestures. “Dzemo,” sung by Tome Bojn (b. 1929), recounts the revenge killing of Dzhemail Aga, grounding historical violence in personal memory and inherited grievance. Together, these songs demonstrate how folk tradition carries ethics, fear, and justice as lived knowledge.

Threaded between these exhalations are extended wordless spaces where Doneff’s instrumental pieces function as corridors between testimonies. “Flow” opens this terrain with a radiant spread of piano, laying out a landscape where the living and the dead move together. Mandola and tombak provide traction, while a violin lifts memory skyward toward something unforgotten. “Prism” refracts emotion into color, turning sound into touch, a moment of fragile wonder. “Monologue,” an arco double bass solo, is a meditation on loss already named, allowing sorrow to resonate and slowly quiet. “Ghosts of Freedom” lingers with spectral patience, giving shape to implications too heavy for words. “Meglen” serves as connective tissue, bass and percussion sketching a passage rather than a destination. The title track itself emerges from ambient sounds recorded at the cemetery of Rousilvo, dissolving the boundary between presence and absence. “Ni Tvoj Ni Moj,” also rendered via the bow, strips a traditional ballad to its emotional bone. “Pepel” closes the album with classical guitar, light percussion, and the sound of locals speaking bilingually in Macedonian and Greek about atrocities suffered in Edessa Voden during the late 1940s. These unpolished voices do not seek resolution. They exist as ash does, settled, persistent, unavoidable.

Roden Voden matters because it refuses to let history become abstraction. These recordings are not artifacts sealed behind glass. They breathe, falter, contradict, and endure. By interweaving them with contemporary composition, Doneff does not attempt to heal the past. The album suggests that remembrance is not about closure or reclaiming a pure origin. It is about staying with what is difficult, listening without impatience, and recognizing that perseverance often sounds like an unfinished song. In the end, the album does not ask us to remember more clearly but more honestly and to accept that even in fear, even in silence, the old song awaits.

Dine Doneff: Doudoule (neRED/5)

| Tyran Grillo

Tom Arthurs trumpet
Antonis Anissegos piano, prepared piano
Stamatis Pasopoulos bayan
Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, percussion, vocals
Recorded live at Stadtkirche, Rudolstadt
July 6, 2014
Editing: Tome Rapovina
Mastering: Kostas Kontos
Cover/Design: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Dine Doneff

Doudoule begins as a quiet act of assembly, four distinct presences finding one another in real time. Dine Doneff’s bass sets the initial pulse, opening space rather than filling it. Tom Arthurs’ trumpet waits, listening before speaking, attentive to what is already forming around him. Antonis Anissegos approaches from another angle, his piano ready to shift the ground beneath with a single chord or sudden flight. Stamatis Pasopoulos completes the circle with the bayan, an instrument that breathes history and air into the room. Together, they sound less like a band stepping onstage than a conversation already underway, one the listener joins midway, aware that something patient, communal, and deeply human is about to unfold.

“Faces” opens the path. The bass speaks first, soft yet resolute, shaping a malleable mood. It carries light and shade together, suggesting that resolution and doubt are not opposites but companions. Piano chords appear as careful steps across uncertain terrain, each one placed with trust. When the trumpet finally enters, it does so without force, a gradual illumination rather than a flare. The bayan stirs, completing a scene that feels rural and inward, as if fields and sky were meeting inside the music. Nothing fully resolves. The clouds linger at the edges, a reminder of unfinished thoughts and unarticulated concerns. Anissegos’s piano moves between closeness and distance, shifting the listener’s vantage point again and again, teaching us how easily perspective can change without warning.

“Meglen” follows with a different posture. The bass intro here is more angular, almost architectural, yet it breathes freely, allowing swing to bend its lines. From this foundation, a broad and generous theme blooms. The quartet sounds fully assembled now. The trumpet rises with clarity and calm assurance, drawing the listener into a melodic current that feels warming and protective. There is a sense of shelter in this piece, of sound offered as refuge during a cold season. The group’s union becomes palpable, each instrument reinforcing the others without obscuring their character.

The title track moves the goal post once more. It opens playfully, the bass again leading, but this time with a more elastic, inviting tone. Rhythm loosens its grip, allowing the bayan and piano to dance into view. The music becomes communal and animated, buoyed by chant-like vocalizations. There is joy here, but it is grounded rather than ecstatic. Arthurs takes flight above the rhythm, yet never loses contact with what lies below. His trumpet feels like a collective voice lifted skyward. Form and feeling intertwine so closely that they become indistinguishable.

With “Rite of Passage,” the album turns inward. Bass and bayan blend into a more somber hue, their lines tinged with reflection and quiet gravity. A dialogue emerges between bass and trumpet, intimate and exposed, as if the music were speaking directly to its own origins. This exchange reaches toward something essential in Doneff’s musical ethos, a belief in honesty over ornament, in vulnerability as strength. The piece then transforms, slipping into a dreamlike terrain shaped by prepared piano and percussive textures. The familiar dissolves, and what remains is a sense of standing between what has been known and what has yet to take shape.

Last is “Prolet,” where the surreal elements continue to expand before slowly converging. Themes gather as if guided by an unseen gravity, aligning themselves into a closing statement that feels earned rather than imposed. Doneff’s guitar and subtle percussion trace fleeting highlights through the texture, like sunlight catching on distant landscapes glimpsed in sleep. These sounds do not point backward so much as outward, toward places imagined and possibilities still forming.

In its final moments, Doudoule resists the temptation to summarize itself. Instead, it opens a quiet question: How does a shared journey reshape those who walk it together? The music suggests that meaning is found in the very act of listening, in remaining attentive to change and to one another. As the last tones fade, what lingers is awareness, a sense that the path continues beyond the performance, carried forward in memory and in the next act of collective creation.

Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM

| Tyran Grillo

Horizons Touched

It’s all our music.
–Robert Frost, “The Self-Seeker”

I. A Living Archive

Few record labels compel us to approach them in any way other than chronologically. ECM is one of them. Its catalogue does not merely document music made; it charts ways of listening learned, unlearned, and learned again. Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM arrives, then, not as a monument erected after the fact but as an attempt to take measure of a phenomenon still in motion, to listen back without closing the ear to what has yet to sound.

The importance of this book, devotedly published by Granta Books in 2007, lies precisely here. Rather than offering a definitive account of ECM, it gathers voices, memories, and reflections in a way that mirrors the label’s own refusal of finality. It does not summarize so much as resonate. In doing so, it becomes something rarer than an institutional history: a field of attentiveness, an act of collective listening directed both backward and forward. What is preserved is sensibility over consensus.

In his introduction, Steve Lake rightly calls ECM a “work-in-progress.” Indeed, ECM is not a repository of completed statements but a living archive in which the contributions of everyone who makes it a reality function as vital organs within a larger, thriving body. The questions posed throughout the book are as follows: How does one listen to a past that refuses to settle into style, school, or doctrine? How does one write about music that has always positioned itself slightly ahead of its own reception?

Before ECM and its leadership under bassist-turned-producer Manfred Eicher, no one had thought of space in jazz in quite the same way. Through Eicher’s early work with engineers Martin Wieland and Jan Erik Kongshaug, the recording studio itself emerged as an unspoken player, an active participant rather than a neutral container. Light entered sound. Atmosphere became structural. Silence was no longer an absence but a condition. Yet even this often-cited “ECM sound” resists fixation, not because it lacks identity but because it repels reduction.

Given that so many locations, musicians, and traditions have passed through the label, to distill its ethos into a single style would be to flatten precisely what has given it life. As Eicher admitted in a 1999 interview, “All that can be really said about the ‘ECM sound’ at this point is that the sound that you hear is the sound that we like.” From this deceptively modest admission unfolds an expansive reality. What began as a jazz imprint grew far beyond the conventions of genre, making room for folk music, film soundtracks, electro-acoustic alchemy, and, with ECM New Series, classical streams grafted into the same current. Even there, the borders remain porous: Jan Garbarek improvising alongside the Hilliard Ensemble; curated excerpts from a Heiner Goebbels sound installation; Keith Jarrett playing Bach’s French Suites on harpsichord.

Horizons Touched matters because it understands this permeability not as a problem to be solved but as a condition to be honored. Enabled by over 100 contributors, the book presents itself as an “oral history,” though the term hardly captures its scope. What emerges instead is a polyphonic portrait of a label that has always worked obliquely through implication, atmosphere, and trust. Like the music it documents, the book does not insist. It invites. And in doing so, it affirms ECM as a listening practice still unfolding.

II. Seeing as Listening

It is telling that, following Lake’s opening statement, the essays do not begin with Eicher but with “Our Music: Synopsis for a Film” by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. The filmmakers speak of seeing as listening, and few in their art would know better. This inversion of sensory hierarchy sets the tone for what follows.

Eicher’s essay, “The Periphery and the Centre,” originally delivered as a speech upon receiving the Kultureller Ehrenpreis of the City of Munich in 2005, continues this meditation on margins and essence. He speaks of the ECM office in Munich, located in what he calls “a no man’s land of industrial culture” at the periphery of things. Having been there myself, I can attest to its uncanny contradiction of placelessness and situatedness. Yet Eicher cautions against romanticizing such things: “We must never settle too comfortably at the periphery—the margin should only be a source, a spot from which to grasp the essence of the centre.”

His reflections braid together formative years in music school and the cinema, early encounters with Godard and others yielding a profound understanding of the overlaps between ears and eyes. For Eicher, atmosphere is not decorative but catalytic. “The atmosphere produced at a recording session,” he writes, “should be inimitable and awaken the desire to make changes or, where necessary, to improve and perfect.”

III. Redefining Tradition: European and Northern Voices

John Fordham’s “ECM and European Jazz” traces how figures like Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber became pioneers not by breaking with tradition but by redefining it as personally as possible. Weber’s admonition to his band—“you can play anything, as long as it doesn’t sound like jazz”—was a refusal of complacency. As Americans like Keith Jarrett, Bill Frisell, and Pat Metheny entered the fold and collaborated with European musicians, the sound expanded further. British artists such as Norma Winstone and John Taylor, alongside Kenny Wheeler in the influential Azimuth trio (with Ralph Towner welcomed into the circle), contributed to this widening field. Saxophonists John Surman—particularly in his solo recordings—and Evan Parker, with his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, ensured that the threat of typecasting never fully took hold.

On the mainland, artists like Louis Sclavis, Enrico Rava, Tomasz Stańko, and Miroslav Vitouš laid the groundwork for a new canon. And then there are the Scandinavians, whose presence Michael Tucker explores in “Northbound: ECM and ‘The Idea of North.’” What Tucker calls “a multi-hued Northern aura” begins with Afric Pepperbird, Garbarek’s historic recording with Terje Rypdal, Arild Andersen, and Jon Christensen. Yet this “North” is less a geographic persuasion than an idea taking shape in those who inhabit it or yearn toward it.

To my ears, few albums embody this sensibility more adroitly than Rypdal’s If Mountains Could Sing. But the Northern idea is not all cool washes and snowbound stillness. There is also unrest and existential fervor, as in the shamanic charge of Garbarek’s Visible World, which, despite its cool sheen, is rich with colorful flame. Even in the gentler worlds of Tord Gustavsen and Mathias Eick, there is a nomadism that never feels quite settled in its skin.

IV. Liminal Spaces and Less is More

This sense of in-betweenness finds articulate expression in Ivan Moody’s 2004 conversation with Jan Garbarek, “On Parallel Lines.” Garbarek speaks candidly about the difficulty critics have in placing his music. Jazz and classical camps alike often seem unsure how to approach it, leaving it to resound in a liminal space. “I consider myself extremely lucky,” Garbarek says, “because ECM already has a given audience, and they don’t really think of it as jazz or classical: it’s just a certain approach.”

Their dialogue ranges across questions of collaboration with musicians from other traditions, converging on a shared belief that constraints can be the most liberating conditions for creation. “I only seem to have dreams when I’m awake,” Garbarek remarks, a line that feels like an unofficial ECM motto.

V. New Series: Shadows, Voices, and Reinvention

The ECM New Series emerges throughout the book not as an offshoot but as an intensification of the label’s core ethos. John Potter’s “Early Music Discoveries and Experiments” marvels at Eicher’s uncanny ability to bring together musicians, ideas, and inspirations no one else would think to combine—most famously in Officium, but also in the Dowland Project.

Helen Wallace’s “Musicians of the New Series” observes that “the musicians who make ECM recordings are shadowy presences.” (My own early encounters with the New Series included Paul Giger’s Chartres. I remember trying to imagine what he looked like, how he moved while playing. When a clearer photograph finally appeared on Schattenwelt, it felt like seeing, through time, a mythical figure brought briefly into focus.) Wallace also notes the lack of musician biographies in the CD booklets, emphasizing that these recordings arise not from contracts but from shared visions and relationships with living composers illuminated by deeply human interpretations, resting in a nest of empathy.

Peter Rüedi’s “Continuity in Change: The Metamorphoses of Keith Jarrett” goes on to frame genius as a state of constant reformation rather than a sustained pinnacle. Jarrett’s “many-sidedness,” of “supernatural proportions,” exemplifies this restlessness. Rüedi speaks of the hymnic quality shared by Jarrett’s music and ECM: an ember that glows with varying degrees of warmth, sometimes sparking fires that take on lives of their own beyond the hearth.

VI. Free Playing, American Roots, and the Canvas Without an Edge

Josef Woodard’s “ECM and US Jazz” reminds us that the label has always been “a source of cohesion” for American artists and a further corrective to simplistic notions of the “ECM sound.” The label’s genesis lay with Mal Waldron, and figures like the Art Ensemble of Chicago brought incendiary free-jazz energy into its orbit. Jack DeJohnette, Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Ralph Towner, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano, Peter Erskine, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, Steve Swallow, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, and Charles Lloyd all testify to a lineage of hard-edged expressivity as much as lyric spaciousness.

In “The Free Matrix,” Steve Lake’s interview with Eicher, free playing again emerges as a foundational principle. Eicher recalls early encounters with Paul Bley and identifies a “special electricity” shared by artists as varied as Glenn Gould, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett—an ability to act as “an inspired catalyst whatever the context.” Music, Eicher says, is “a canvas without an edge.” He recounts the genesis of the label’s name, inspired by Werner Goldschmidt’s Wergo series and Stockhausen’s From the Seven Days, leading him to imagine loosening borders through the idea of an “edition” (borrowed from the world of visual art) of contemporality. Thus, Edition of Contemporary Music was born. He likens the label to a sea: “A continuous movement of undercurrents and unexpected drifts… But sometimes the sea is tranquil, and stays tranquil.”

Keith Jarrett’s essay, “Inside Out: Thoughts on Free Playing,” deepens this philosophy. He distinguishes between artists who treat nothingness as lack and those who understand it as a state “pregnant with everything.” His notion of having “accidents on purpose” feels like a quiet manifesto for improvisation.

VII. Forms, Covers, Folkways, and Modernist Echoes

ECM’s visual identity receives eloquent treatment in Lars Müller’s “The ECM Cover.” Müller sees the label as transforming its musical philosophy into the realm of vision. The covers rarely illustrate the music directly, yet they exist in harmony with it—two verses from the same poem, not mirror images.

Karl Lippegaus, in “Colours, Densities, Forms,” traces how ECM reshaped folk music through artists such as Egberto Gismonti, Anouar Brahem, Lena Willemark, Savina Yannatou, Eleni Karaindrou, Gianluigi Trovesi, Shankar, and Dino Saluzzi. He also recounts asking Eicher why ECM albums open with five seconds of silence. Eicher laughed: “People need time to sit down, don’t they?”

Paul Griffiths’s “Against the Grain: Modernist Voices” reframes modernism not as rupture but as continuity. For example, in Thomas Demenga’s fifteen-year traversal of the Bach cello suites—paired with works by Holliger, Veress, and Isang Yun—Bach emerges as modern for his time, just as modern works echo the past. Griffiths writes lovingly of Holliger and Kurtág as poets, a lineage that includes the spoken-word forays of Bruno Ganz (to say nothing of Griffiths’s own).

Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich’s “All Roads Lead to Bach” both confirms and dismantles Bach’s mythic status. Bach was no passive vessel of divine inspiration but a laborious musical scientist whose work fell out of favor for decades. Returning to Bach, Jungheinrich argues, is an anti-Romantic gesture, one that resonates deeply with jazz musicians like Jarrett. Yet ultimately, the metaphor inverts itself: not all roads lead back to Bach; they stem from him outward into space and time.

VIII. Instruments, Futures, and the Listener’s Life

John Cratchley’s “ECM and the Guitar” charts the instrument’s breadth across the label—from Abercrombie, Towner, Connors, Frisell, Tibbetts, Rypdal, and Metheny to figures like Keith Rowe, Mick Goodrick, Derek Bailey, and Christy Doran—extending into the next generation with Jacob Young.

John Kelman’s “Present and Future Songs” characterizes ECM as a place of discovery. Alongside its mainstays, it has consistently welcomed new voices: Trygve Seim, Christian Wallumrød, Tord Gustavsen, Savina Yannatou. What unites them, Kelman writes, is not style but vision: “All hold humanity as paramount; all ask that music be accepted as a contradiction, engaging perfectionist ideal and practical imperfection.”

Geoff Dyer’s “Editions of Contemporary Me” offers a listener’s diary, his discovery of ECM entwined with the formation of his inner life. It makes me nostalgic for my own early listening sessions with friends, before digital fragmentation fractured albums into isolated tracks.

Further interviews, such as Griffiths and Lake’s with Eicher, reaffirm that the New Series was never a departure, only a continuation of ECM’s inner spirit. Thomas Steinfeld’s “Words and Music” explores the “aesthetical alliances” listeners inevitably draw across the label’s vast terrain.

IX. Voices, Engineers, and the Hand Holding the Key

Interleaved among the essays, Horizons Touched offers biographical sketches and first-person statements from ECM’s musicians, each a small window that opens onto a whole climate. These fragments do not merely annotate the label’s history; they humanize its method. They remind us that ECM’s continuity is not a doctrine but a chain of encounters: one musician hearing another across a room, across a record, across years, then walking away altered.

Jan Garbarek’s recollections of meeting Don Cherry glow with this catalytic force. Cherry’s folk sensibilities did not function as ornament or exotic garnish; they sank into Garbarek’s musical bloodstream, shaping how the saxophonist would understand melody as something older than genre, something carried like a story rather than “played” like a role. John Surman, too, appears not as a solitary figure descending fully formed but as someone who fell in with the Norwegian jazz scene by way of circumstance and gravity via Karin Krog’s quintet with Arild Andersen, Jon Christensen, Garbarek, and Terje Bjørklund—a scene, then, as a confluence of players finding shared weather.

The book is equally attentive to the invisible labor that turns vision into sound. Iro Haarla’s memories of bringing her partner Edward Vesala’s musical worlds to life are among the most moving examples. Vesala would sing ideas into a tape recorder—raw transmissions, half-formed, urgent—and Haarla would transcribe them, arrange them, translate the unrepeatable into something held and shared, using those recordings and other means of transmission. Here, creativity is shown not as solitary lightning but as an act of listening so deep it becomes architecture.

Generational echoes reverberate as well. Trygve Seim recalls his first encounter with Jan Garbarek—not in person, but through the spell of Eventyr, which set him on the path toward the saxophone at a time in his life when he was more interested in sports. That detail matters: it gives us the unmistakable sense of a life diverted by sound, a horizon touched early enough to become destiny.

From the New Series world, Kim Kashkashian offers a statement that feels like reassurance and challenge: the intense preparation of a recording is precisely when “preconceived notions are abandoned and the music is created anew.” ECM’s paradox—rigor as the gateway to freedom—finds proof in her fearless championing of Kurtág, Mansurian, Kancheli, and so many others, repertoire approached not as museum artifact but as living material, remade in the present tense. András Schiff appears, too, animated by a seeking spirit that never settles for attainment, spurring him toward greater interpretative levels, as if interpretation were not a finishing touch but an ethical pursuit, a way of staying in motion.

Anouar Brahem’s reflections widen the field again, returning us to that Godardian hinge where sight and sound exchange roles. He speaks of the silence that precedes image and the music that follows it, a dynamic mirrored in many bands along the ECM spectrum, where what is withheld becomes part of what is said, and where the breath before the phrase is meaning. Annette Peacock, in turn, expresses gratitude for Manfred Eicher, whose prophetic understanding of her essence became a leitmotif at ECM, less the discovery of a new artist than the recognition of someone already speaking in her own dialect, waiting for ears fluent enough to listen.

Several statements arrive like aphorisms—compact, paradoxical, strangely complete. Christian Wallumrød’s reflections on harmony and freedom turn composition and improvisation into mirror arts: “You write something because you couldn’t improvise it, and you improve something because it couldn’t be written.” Carla Bley’s slow, forward-thinking approach to making music is distilled into another truth earned over decades: “My solos usually end because I’ve had to abandon them.” Such statements suggest minds always moving ahead of what the hands can say.

Folk tradition is not treated as a quaint inheritance but as a living accumulation. Ale Möller speaks from deep knowledge, describing folk music as cumulative and locating ECM’s contribution in inward intensification, “increasing the inner density in music by reducing the external.” Dino Saluzzi sharpens this imperative by insisting on emotional sensitivity as the bridge to freedom: “Art doesn’t need muscles.” Robert Wilson’s poetic hymn to ECM (stylized as “Every Color Maginable”) extends the label into chromatic metaphysics. And Gidon Kremer, attentive to the bond between composer, performer, listener, articulates his love for Eicher’s vision of bringing them lucidly to us: “ECM stands for music intent on communicating something to us.”

Taken together, these voices form their own ensemble, less a supplement to the book than its beating heart. They do what ECM has always done at its best: place the “work” back into the work, the human back into myth, reminding us that the key is never merely the catalogue, the studio, the aesthetic.

The book closes not with an argument but with a gesture. Paul Griffiths raises a glass in the form of a prose poem written in Ophelian, in which meaning and music collapse into one another: “The key is in his hand. The key is his hand. There’s music in that hand.” The image lingers, unfinished, as if the act of letting go is where melody begins.

Leading up to this closing utterance is a dotted path of voices whose work has shaped ECM as surely as any score or improvisation. Reflections from photographers and visual artists—Roberto Masotti, Jan Jedlička, Jim Bengston, Mayo Bucher, Thomas Wunsch, Dieter Rehm—remind us that ECM’s sound has always traveled with an image, even when that image defies the conventions of illustration. Their contributions affirm the label’s belief that vision and music are parallel arts, each extending the other’s reach without collapsing into it.

Equally essential are the engineers, those who inhabit the threshold where intention becomes vibration. Peter Laenger, Jan Erik Kongshaug, James Farber, Stefano Amerio, and Gérard de Haro speak from within the studio’s invisible architecture, where listening is technical and moral. Amerio’s remark—“Recording for ECM means opening your mind to 360 degrees”—could stand as an epigraph for the enterprise. It names a practice of attention that is spherical rather than linear, attuned not only to what is played but to what surrounds it, precedes it, remains after it fades.

In ending this way, Horizons Touched refuses closure in the conventional sense. Instead, it disperses authorship, returning the music to the many hands that have shaped it, hands that frame images, tune microphones, adjust distances, wait for silence to speak. The key does not lock the door behind us. It stays in the hand, warm, provisional, ready to be passed on.

X. The Horizon Remains Open

Horizons Touched does not seek to close a circle. It leaves it slightly ajar, breathing. ECM has always seemed less concerned with preservation than with readiness for the next silence, the next alignment of breath and intention, the next sound that arrives without asking permission. To listen in this way is to relinquish certainty. It means accepting that meaning does not always announce itself, that music may resist immediate comprehension, that its most lasting truths often surface obliquely, long after the final note has faded. ECM’s legacy, if it can be called that, is not a fixed aesthetic but a discipline of sustained attention.

In this sense, the future of listening suggested here is neither utopian nor nostalgic. It is quieter, more demanding. It asks for patience in a culture of acceleration, for depth in a time of surfaces. It asks us to sit with ambiguity, to trust that what has not yet resolved may still be working on us, shaping us from within. The music does not rush to meet the listener; it waits. And in that waiting, something essential is restored.

Perhaps this is the true horizon being touched. Not a distant line toward which we move but a threshold we learn to inhabit. A space where sound and silence exchange roles, where intention loosens its grip, where listening becomes less about capture than encounter. The future implied by Horizons Touched is one in which music continues to arrive from unexpected directions, carrying with it traces of many worlds, yet asking only one thing in return: that we be present enough to hear it.

The horizon remains open because it must. To close it would be to mistake listening for possession. And ECM, at its heart, has never been about owning sound—only about making room for it, and trusting that what enters will know what to do next.

Dietmar Brehm: PRAXIS SELECTION (INDEX 047)

| Tyran Grillo

PRAXIS SELECTION feels less like a compilation than an ongoing physiological test, an attempt to discover what images can endure before collapsing into pure sensation. Drawn from the sprawling PRAXIS cycle (2007-2015), these forty pieces, of which the below only touches upon highlights, operate as a catalogue of intensities that never buy into logic. As Stefan Grissemann astutely observes, Dietmar Brehm’s “secular icons irritate precisely because they never reveal their aim, often not even disclosing what is happening in and to them.” They do not point toward meaning so much as enact its very possibility, stripping “praxis” of any political or ideological inheritance in favor of naked dissociation.

Brehm moves from erotic to clinical, from diaristic to abstract, yet each mode is a membrane that can be pierced, stretched, or contaminated. The digital clarity of the later entries is abraded by bumped microphones and the sounds of equipment being dragged, as if the assembler were refusing the illusion of being “hands off.” Even the concluding glyphs that begin to appear are cryptic enough to obscure what precedes them. As our vision is heightened, impaired, and rerouted, we are left caught in the performative residue of it all.

1000 Blitze

A few distortions of reality serve as anchors for the larger constellation. 1000 Blitze (1000 Bolts) turns lightning into a vascular network, an illuminated anatomy of perception that overwhelms the sensorium. Vision feels compromised yet somehow more acute, as if the eye were seeing its own interior. Himmel (Sky) distills the world into a single fly drifting in an impossible blue expanse while rain murmurs in the soundtrack. The insect is reduced to an atmospheric event, a coherence of sentience within a monolithic field. Here, Brehm demonstrates how minimal stimuli can trigger an almost cosmic alertness.

Übung

This shift from the microscopic to the elemental reappears in Übung (Exercise), where a figure is thrust toward the camera, lit as if by an emergency sign from within. Strobes slide across sweat and skin until the figure becomes particulate, edging toward ash. Schwarzensee repeats the experience through landscape: bands of colored water glide past while the creak of a rowboat grounds the abstraction in human effort.

Basis pH

The domestic sphere proves no safer. Vollmund (Full Moon) frames eggs frying, cigarettes burning, Coke bottles bending, and a child’s cheerful “Let’s go,” all glimpsed through a circular aperture that turns the mundane into a pupil of surveillance. In Basis pH, the application of makeup is a study in exposure rather than beautification, as if each gesture were removing a layer of self-protection rather than adding one. It’s the private act as uncertain confession.

Berlin

Brehm’s engagement with pornography punctuates at regular intervals but refuses eroticism. Peng Peng links desire to violation by intercutting voyeuristic gazes with surgical imagery, whereas Berlin and Paris tint fleshly negatives green or red-blue until their physics appear industrial.

Röntgen

Self-portraiture assumes the identity of a malfunction. Chesterfield shows Brehm flickering beside a car while a metronome hammers machinically. In Charles, a drained, remorse-free face is doubled by a twin that never quite aligns, enacting a moral vacancy. Röntgen (X-Ray) meshes screaming vocals with inverted faces and vehicles in a radiographic exorcism. Such pieces insist that identity is not a stable referent but an affectation that appears only when stressed, inverted, or pulled apart.

Sonne Halt

As chronology grows, so does the gentility of Brehm’s touch. Licht (Light) is a standout in this regard: a hand caresses a lampshade again and again in a manner so tender that it borders on obsession. Sonne Halt (Sun Stop) freezes the sun between two towers as a red circle that pins luminosity to the board of life without extinguishing it. Cocktail shifts into a reflective register as Brehm diverts focus to his layered image, jazz sketching itself in the background.

Oxford

The selection concludes with uncanny simplicity. Oxford holds a pair of dress shoes against the firmament. Walking on air? Hello Mabuse converts a simple handshake into a bureaucratic nightmare, framed by ominous clocks. And Rolle returns to repetition as ritual, walking toward and away from the camera near a bale of hay until the act becomes a mantra.

Throughout PRAXIS, Brehm interrogates the image’s ability to signify anything beyond material agitation. The cumulative effect is fiercely corporeal, working directly into the viewer’s nervous system. Along the way, we learn how recognition and estrangement can collapse into each other, how ordinary objects can become alien through intensity, and how a soul caught in the act of looking cannot help but feel implicated in what it sees. What remains is a kind of hyper-alive exhaustion. Brehm exposes the vitality of the photographic trace even as he acknowledges the slow death embedded in every act of viewing. These fragments do not cohere, yet their incoherence is the point. Are we really so different?

Dóra Maurer: Thinking in Proportions (INDEX 046)

| Tyran Grillo

Thinking in Proportions hums with the integrity of a mind that treats perception itself as material. The mind in question is that of Dóra Maurer. Born in Budapest and trained as a printmaker, she did not enter moving pictures through story or representation but through process—the lifeblood of spatial relations. She describes her works as “displacements,” and each indeed alters the coordinates of seeing by measured degrees, thought revealing itself as something with weight and texture. Her structural rigor never hardens into rigidity. Instead, she builds systems in which freedom accumulates quietly, like breath made visible in winter. The viewer begins to sense that Maurer is a grammarian of matter whose proportions anchor themselves to the world with both scientific precision and metaphysical resonance.

Learned Spontaneous Movements (1973) introduces this tension between rule and release through four takes of small gestures performed as Maurer reads: hair twirled, lips bitten, fingers moved toward the mouth in tiny cycles of self-soothing. Variations accumulate with the logic of an étude. The voiceover in an untranslated language becomes a ghost-signal whose meaning is withheld but whose cadence settles into the room. As takes multiply, comprehension erodes until only rhythm remains in unconscious behavioral patterning.

Relative Swingings (1973/75) is a mesmerizing exploration of a conical lamp swinging in space and recorded through a split-screen setup that reveals both the object and the mechanism filming it. Maurer exposes the infrastructure of perception, letting the camera that films the camera act as a kind of auxiliary consciousness. Mechanical grinding aligns with the lamp’s pendular arc. And then, a quiet miracle occurs as the object takes on a cosmic significance. The pleasure of watching it feels as if a thought had been suspended in the air and allowed to make its own skeleton visible.

Timing (1973-80) brings us closer to the body. A plain linen sheet becomes a screen, an object, and a problem. It is folded and unfolded while mirrored projections track its shifting geometry. The absence of sound lays bare the concentration at work, turning domestic labor into a contemplative action. The sheet’s creases are diagrams of invisible forces that echo contractions of memory, landscape, and skin.

Proportions (1979), Maurer’s first piece made with video, is intimate in its austerity. She uses a long roll of paper to measure her arms, legs, head, and torso, thus charting the room and the world around her. She walks with her hands, rolls her head across the paper, and marks every change of course through profound self-calibration. The message is undeniable: without us to insist on their significance, metrics would fall apart like so many atoms.

With Triolets (1980), she achieves a crystalline balance between three focal lengths, three subjects, and three sung tones that assume ceremonial force. Bodies and objects split and converge in a ritual of repetition that liberates rather than confines. The voices, sung in quiet invocation, lend the work an air of secular liturgy. It is among the cycle’s most resonant pieces, a sustained articulation of harmony born from constraint.

Kalah (1980) transforms an ancient Arabic board game into a synesthetic machine. Colored squares pulse with tones, evoking early video graphics or elemental sound scores. It appears playful on the surface, yet behind the game’s syncopation lies the proportional logic that threads through Maurer’s practice writ large. Strategy is now an acoustic and chromatic event.

The Inter-Images trilogy (1989/90) stretches into mediation. Part 1, “Retardation,” shows a face glimpsed through rectangles that flicker like shuttered windows, each opening accompanied by electronic tones. Part 2, “Streams of Balance,” follows a nearly nude male dancer in a dark, overhead-lit space, mapping equilibrium with anatomical poise. Part 3, “Anti-Zoetrope,” places two men boxing within a cylindrical enclosure viewed through vertical slits, slowing violent motion into sculptural intervals.

The bonus piece, Space Painting, Project Buchberg (1982/83), anchors her cinematic and painterly intelligence. She moves through an outdoor environment as if drawing from it, painting with air and light while allowing landscape, stone, and shadow to render the action in a whispered manifesto. Art is not imposed upon space but coaxed from it, uncovered through engagement rather than declaration.

Throughout this artfully curated program, Maurer returns again and again to the idea that seeing is a disciplined act, a negotiation between structure and sensation. She seeks not to depict the world but to reorganize it proportion by proportion so that the viewer can relearn how to treat the eyes not as windows but as crucibles for the everyday.

Gustav Deutsch: NOT HOME. Picturing the Foreign Films 1990-2015 (INDEX 045)

| Tyran Grillo

Behind the films collected on NOT HOME lies an inquiry into the act of seeing, shaped by the unsettling realization that vision is never objective or neutral. To witness the world through images one did not make is to inherit the desires, omissions, and vulnerabilities of subjective strangers. Having long worked as a cartographer of found memory, Gustav Deutsch finds himself in the more elusive position of a traveler who never arrives, someone perpetually foreign even in the intimacy of his own gaze. What does it mean to be the custodian of other people’s looking, and what is revealed when the world is glimpsed through perspectives that cannot be fully assimilated?

Adria – Holiday Films 1954-68 (School of Seeing I) lays track by presenting postwar tourist films as if they were relics of some vanished civilization. Its structure moves from still shots to views from vehicles to montages in motion, a transition from the fixed monumentality of place to the restlessness of those attempting to inhabit it. Signs, oceans, bridges, cars, beaches, and faces gather into a quiet taxonomy of yearning. These fragments carry an ache, as if time had already begun erasing them during the very moment of their recording. The Venice passage becomes a kind of primal scene: a man serenades us on the rising waters, yet we hear nothing. Expression survives only as the ghost of a gesture. Those cradled in frame are almost certainly gone, their vitality preserved in an archive that cares nothing for mortality. Deutsch teases out this paradox—that these films were meant to enshrine happiness yet now mirror the fragility of all that once felt permanent—with painful clarity.

Eyewitnesses in Foreign Countries (1993), made with Moroccan filmmaker Mostafa Tabbou, turns Deutsch into a documented outsider. Six hundred shots, each lasting three seconds, alternate between Figuig and Vienna in a steady, metronomic rhythm. Deutsch’s astonishment at the desert’s elemental force contrasts with Tabbou’s measured attention to the textures of European daily life. The exchange is not symmetrical, the time limit suggesting a fragile equality at best. Deutsch cannot entirely escape the exoticizing pull of unfamiliar territory, while Tabbou renders Vienna without spectacle, letting human detail eclipse architectural bravado.

Notes and Sketches I (2005-15) extends this sensitivity across a decade of small observations. Thirty-one pocket films made with digital cameras and mobile phones emerge as devotional gestures spared from the erosion of ordinary time. The lazy Susan sequence in a restaurant becomes a center of gravity around which an entire perceptual world turns. Plates glide, voices hum, the table rotates, and from this dance an unexpected sanity arises. Sound plays an equal role in these pieces. Spaces speak their own grammar, and Deutsch listens carefully, letting ambient noise shape the contours of each entry. Geography dissolves; what remains is an atlas of attentiveness. These sketches reveal how the unguarded instant often contains more truth than the composed event. They show how perception, when freed from the demand to explain, allows the world to declare its own quiet coherences.

The bonus film, Sat., 29th of June / Arctic Circle (1990), operates as an early crystallization of the larger project. Four travelers pause at the titular location, pose with numbers, and mark their presence as if the boundary they have crossed holds metaphysical weight. Their actions, unconsciously choreographed, are as sincere as they are awkward, unaware that decades later they will be observed as part of an experiment in temporal distance. What they enact is the desire to extract meaning from place, to position one’s own frailty against the indifference of all terrain.

Across these works, Deutsch drifts between ethnographer and wanderer, historian and poet. He gathers glimpses rather than conclusions, tracing the shape of experience without feigning to contain it. And so, the foreign is never simply elsewhere. It appears whenever an image survives the life that produced it. It appears whenever we see ourselves reflected in the gaze of someone we have never met. And it appears whenever the world, in its fleeting instants, reveals that regard is always cyclical.

Ernst Schmidt Jr.: Wienfilm 1896-1976 (ViennaFilm 1896-1976) (INDEX 044)

| Tyran Grillo

Ernst Schmidt Jr.’s Wienfilm 1896-1976 opens its subject the way a cadaver is splayed on a coroner’s table. It does not search for a beating heart but for the conditions that make Vienna both itself and something estranged from itself. Montage is now a diagnostic tool, less a method of assembling meaning than of measuring how it buckles under the weight of mortality. The filmmaker himself calls it “a collage of diverse materials aimed at conveying a distanced image of Vienna,” and this distance is the guiding principle: no seduction, no civic hagiography, only a long, unsettling look at a city that contradicts its own self-image at every turn. The result is almost two hours of historical consciousness unfurling at the pace of a slow-motion sea change.

The project begins innocently enough. Two little girls draw and talk about photography, as if the film were briefly pausing to consider the act of looking before descending into its century-long excavation. Soon, Schmidt Jr. sends his camera wandering into the streets to locate the letters of his name. Thus, identity is something to be scavenged rather than inherited, pulled from signage, storefronts, and neglected typography. The artist reconstructs himself through urban residue, establishing an implicit kinship between detritus and personal (re)formation. Lumière footage from 1896 reminds us that Vienna’s filmed life began in the same mood of wonder that swept Europe. Yet here the vintage images register as a faint alarm, the first entries in an archive that will come to record both innocence and catastrophe, albeit in disproportionate amounts.

A montage of women walking follows, accompanied by a syrupy song about femininity. The sequence drifts uneasily between admiration and objectification, as if the soundtrack were trying to smooth over the very wounds it denies. And that’s when a Nazi parade cuts into frame, 1938 charging forth without commentary or warning. The simple adjacency of images does the work of showing how the bootmarks of the past can never be lifted from the present’s pavement. Peter Weibel appears interviewing passersby about who “owns” Vienna, a question that exposes civic pride as well as civic vacancy. Abandoned buildings and shuttered shops stand as ruins. Joe Berger’s remark, “You can be Viennese all over the world…just not in Vienna,” functions as a darkly comic proposition about belonging, exile, and the contradictory nature of borders.

When Chaplin arrives, mass adoration floods the screen. The crowds reveal a collective fervor that cinema alone seems able to provoke. Ecstatic public unity collides with the kitschy cheer of Wienerlieder, whose supposed affection grows sinister when paired with footage of marching columns, rubble, or muted political assemblies. Such sentimentality takes on a narcotic charge, a way of drowning out the psychic noise of its unresolved history. Freud drifts through as a spectral reference, less a person than a reminder that Vienna’s self-knowledge has always been bound to its neuroses. Dogmatic speeches rise and fall, promising clarity yet delivering only the musical rest of rhetoric. Actionists erupt briefly, warping from within. Ordinary people cross streets, ride trams, and enter buildings, each carrying a share of a saga that exceeds them.

As Wienfilm 1896-1976 nears its end, it no longer behaves like a documentary. It becomes a séance of stone. Schmidt Jr. summons imperial afterimages, post-war silences, and self-mythologizing refrains, letting their intercourse give way to an apparition built from incompatible truths. What remains is a portrait assembled from fragments that resist composition, vibrating with the discomfort of witnessing too much yet understanding too little. A city is not something to be summarized but confronted, piece by tactile piece, in all of its charm and violence, until a composite sketch is revealed that no one can fully bear to recognize as their own.

Peter Weibel: Körperaktionen Bodyworks 1967-2003 (INDEX 043)

| Tyran Grillo

Peter Weibel’s Körperaktionen (Bodyworks) reveal him as the Actionist who refused the Actionists’ mythology. While others pushed inward toward abjection and self-wounding, Weibel turned outward toward media, politics, semiotics, and the body as a site where power writes its own grammar. His gestures are never self-contained eruptions. They are conceptual irritants that question whether an “action” is an event, an inscription, a perceptual trap, or an estrangement from social order. The body becomes the primary medium not because it grants access to primal truth but because it is the site where systems fray at the seams.

Lüstern

This appetite for estrangement is already present in Fingerprint (1968), which uses the film strip to produce sound, image, and a forensic poetics of identity. A print is an index of presence, a bureaucratic marker, a residue of control, and, finally, a reminder that the flesh leaves traces, whether we like it or not. Nüstern (Nostrils) and Lüstern (Lascivious) (both from 1969) push the close-up toward distortion until isolated members appear as media property rather than human attributes. A magnified nose, an eroticized massage revealed as nothing more than an orange, both dismantle the consumer industry’s habit of slicing us into marketable zones of sensation.

Das Recht mit Füßen treten

The Text films from 1974—Augentexte, Mundtext, Stirntext—literalize the notion that the body speaks. Yet the speech is stuttering, mechanical, self-consuming. The eye blinks words, the mouth utters “SCHEISSE” before swallowing it, the forehead writes until it throbs. Language contaminates skin and vice versa. In Das Recht mit Füßen treten (Trampling on Rights, 1967/68), museum visitors step on the word “recht” scattered across the floor in an unwitting political gait. Here, the act belongs to the public, hinting at what is perhaps Weibel’s most radical proposition: spectators are never neutral. Lösung der Phantasie (Solution of Fantasy, 1972) examines hair as a philosophical emblem, elegant when attached to the head and repulsive when shed, offering a small but potent meditation on beauty and decay sharing the same root.

Fluidum und Eigentum: Körperverhältnisse als Eigentumsmaße

Weibel often condenses his motifs of interest into crystalline forms. Wie hat sich aus den Fischen die Mathematik entwickelt? (How Did Mathematics Evolve From the Fish?, 1971) is a self-styled visual haiku centered on a typewritten iteration of “hand,” zooming until the word mutates into a pure visual pattern. Fluidum und Eigentum: Körperverhältnisse als Eigentumsmaße (Fluidum and Property: Body Relations as Measure of Property, 1971/72) examines the idea of property by asking at what scale ownership collapses: bread, chair, room, shadow. Each item passes through the body’s orbit of affordance and discards the illusion that possession is stable.

Kokain(e)

Such explorations of symbolic order continue in Grüß Gott (1967/72), where Weibel and Susanne Widl casually eat pretzel letters forming the titular greeting, turning Austrian piety into edible farce. Kokain(e) (1972) reveals a pornographic image hidden beneath a can of fish printed with St. Stephen’s Cathedral, suggesting that sacred and obscene imagery differ only by their packaging. His reconstruction of Duchamp’s Stoppages-étalon (1970/71) reenacts the dropping of a thread to show that randomness, not symmetry, is the geometry of modernity. Vulkanologie der Emotionen (Vulcanology of the Emotions, 1971/73) arranges bodily poses as geological layers of feeling, while whale-like moans push the human voice toward prelinguistic depths.

Venus im Pelz

Weibel’s inquiry into the politics of looking continues in Aktbesprechung oder Inverses Selbstporträt (Discussion of the Nude or Inverse Self-Portrait, 1975/76), which reverses the male gaze by showing male nudes through women’s descriptions. The men become mirrors without agency, their vulnerability revealed through shifting reactions. Switcher Sex (1972) overlays body parts into unstable configurations, turning gender into an assemblage that resists coherence. Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs, 2003) uses morphing technology to blend centuries of painted Venuses into a single monstrous continuum, exposing the canon as an endlessly repeated, idealized submission. Vers und Vernunft (Rhyme and Reason, 1978) stages Weibel and Widl in a cage of television screens, grunting and breathing themselves into exhaustion until reason gives way to an animal rhythm. Zeitblut – Blutglocke (Timeblood – Bloodbell, 1972/79/83) completes this arc by spilling his own blood on national television. Through this action, every Austrian home was simultaneously filled with his life essence, as if the media had become a circulatory system carrying his interiority into the public domain.

Kunst und Revolution: Brandrede

Three films by Ernst Schmidt Jr., previously seen on INDEX 042, are also included among the selections curated on this DVD. Kunst und Revolution: Brandrede (Art and Revolution: Incendiary Speech, 1968) documents Weibel’s speech from his infamous June 7, 1968, performance at the University of Vienna. With one hand aflame, he quotes Lenin and Chernyshevsky in a powerful deconstruction of rhetoric. “The goal of the speech action,” he recalls, “was to inflame consciousness, to pass the flame of revolution and freedom to its listeners, and it was realized in the form of a body action.” Denkakt (1967) captures Weibel thinking aloud until the medium truncates his thought, proving that technological limits mediate cognition itself: “[F]ilmmaking meaning nothing other than the production, derivation of figures, events according to the possibilities of the formation film, for example with celluloid or the movie auditorium, screen, spectators.” The notorious Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit (From the Portfolio of Doggedness, 1968/69), in which VALIE EXPORT walks Weibel as one would a dog, literalizes power inversion and makes the male body the site of disciplinary display. The title is a play on Aus der Mappe der Menschlichkeit (From the Portfolio of Humanity), a leaflet once distributed weekly by the Red Cross.

Across these projects, Weibel does not use the self to enact mysticism or sacrifice. He treats it as a contested field where authority, machinery, desire, and perception collide, and where every decision reveals the infrastructures attempting to constrict it. His Actions expose that the body, even in the absence of a camera, is already mediated by the lens of the human eye and that the screen is not a recording device but a palimpsest for sociopolitical fictions. Over decades, Weibel has pursued nothing less than a decolonization of the sensorium. He invites us to notice what we have been trained to ignore, to feel what we anesthetize, and to recognize how deeply the rules of visibility are written into these bags of bones we imagine as our own.