Alfred Kaiser: Decomposing Nazi Phraseology (INDEX 050)

| Tyran Grillo

When Alfred Kaiser first unveiled Ein drittes Reich (A Third Reich, 1975) and Ein drittes Reich aus seinem Abfall (A Third Reich from Its Refuse, 1977) near the close of the 1970s, his name carried none of the institutional weight that often cushions difficult art. Yet these films announced themselves with startling authority, assembling from the wreckage of Nazi image culture a pair of works so rigorous, so corrosively lucid, that they seemed less edited than excavated. Kaiser worked exclusively with material produced during the Third Reich itself, fashioning a cinema of diseased memory from propaganda reels, industrial films, amateur footage, educational shorts, and features. The achievement recalls the dialectical brilliance of Jean-Luc Godard at his most severe, especially in its use of sound and its archaeological chill. Every splice is a brush uncovering bone. Each cut reveals another layer of ideological sediment hardened into spectacle.

What emerges across both films is a study of seduction. Kaiser does not merely expose propaganda as deception. He understands that fascism first enters the bloodstream as longing. The camera under National Socialism adored surfaces with devotional intensity. Flesh, architecture, wheat, steel, children, rivers, flags, and clouds: all of these projection surfaces glow with the fatal glamour of belonging. Kaiser takes them seriously enough to let them betray themselves. He grants them space to speak in their own poisoned tongue until their ecstasies curdle into confession, séances conducted in the language of seduction itself.

Born in Vienna in 1940, Kaiser came of age among artists determined to confront the psychic debris left scattered across postwar Europe. He moved within a circle that included Hermann Nitsch and Peter Kubelka, the latter becoming both mentor and catalyst. Kubelka’s influence stretched beyond aesthetics into the very material conditions of Kaiser’s practice. Under the auspices of the Austrian Film Museum, which Kubelka co-founded, Kaiser gained extraordinary access to archival holdings from the Nazi era. Constantin Wulff’s illuminating liner notes for this INDEX edition recount how the museum organized its landmark retrospective “Propaganda and Counterpropaganda in Film from 1933 to 1945,” a program juxtaposing works from Nazi Germany with Allied propaganda films. The series dissolved comforting moral distances between victor and vanquished, insisting instead on a universal machinery of persuasion. One senses Kaiser absorbing this revelation as a grammar lurking within modernity itself. 

At the museum, Kaiser studied these archives frame by frame at the editing table, touching history at its cellular level. The process must have resembled an encounter with a haunted alphabet. He had already wrestled with Nazi aesthetics through painting and writing, most notably in his extraordinary Hitler watercolor series produced between 1974 and 1975 (included here as a DVD extra), where the dictator’s likeness was filtered through the vocabularies of art history, from classical portraiture to pop art vulgarity. Yet cinema gave Kaiser something painting could not: the tremor between image and sound where ideology often hides its deepest impulses.

A Third Reich unfolds like a hallucination narrated by the regime itself. An arrow plunges into the sea. Wheat fields writhe beneath invisible winds. Bodies appear less human than agricultural, cultivated toward some impossible purity. Kaiser arranges these elements with terrifying precision, allowing associations to bloom and decay within the viewer’s mind. The Reich’s obsession with fertility and physical perfection acquires a mythic texture, as though fascism dreamed of transforming society into one endless reproductive ritual. Men become engines. Women become vessels. Childhood stretches toward militarization with dreadful inevitability, every stage of life absorbed into the geometry of obedience.

The brilliance of Kaiser’s montage lies in its refusal of explanatory comfort. Meaning accumulates through pressure rather than argument. Trees crash violently to the ground while voices extol unity and destiny. Soldiers grin with frightening innocence as war approaches. Factories pulse with infernal vitality. Steel glimmers as sacrament. At one moment, the interior of a cathedral appears while gunfire echoes across the soundtrack, the holy collapsing seamlessly into mechanized death. Elsewhere, calf slaughter collides with laughter, flesh reduced to material amid communal joy. The regime’s rhetoric of life, truth, freedom, and labor becomes nothing more than a vain repetition. Words lose semantic stability and become rhythmic instruments designed to anesthetize thought itself. By the time cries of “Heil!” erupt into darkness, our endurance is tested.

Kaiser understood that fascism aestheticizes continuity above all else. It promises a seamless world where contradiction dissolves into collective purpose. Masculinity flows from boyhood into soldierhood without rupture. Industry merges with nationalism. Sexuality merges with reproduction. Nature merges with conquest. Even death becomes assimilated into a narrative of purification. The horror resides partly in the elegance of the construction. National Socialism dreamed of eliminating ambiguity from existence. Kaiser restores ambiguity to every frame as a necessary contagion.

A Third Reich from Its Refuse pushes these ideas into stranger and more intimate territory. If the earlier project resembles an autopsy, the latter behaves like a fever dream assembled from cultural leftovers. Spoken slogans recede. Definitive montage structures collapse. Pop songs drift across sequences of fascist pomp with unnerving tenderness, producing emotional dissonances that feel almost unbearable. Kaiser reportedly wished the film screened only within a “private circle,” an instruction that lends an atmosphere of forbidden correspondence passed secretly between survivors of some psychic catastrophe. 

The camera circles beauty obsessively. Women exercise gracefully beneath skies emptied of consequence. Hitler appears smiling, delighted by his own reflection mirrored in adoring crowds. Consumption becomes ritualized, whether of food, entertainment, labor, or bodies. Everything shimmers with the narcotic glow of satisfaction. Yet beneath this choreography of pleasure lies an abyss. Kaiser reveals how fascism feeds upon the human desire to escape uncertainty. The regime offers paradise through simplification and meaning through surrender.

What makes the proceedings so unsettling is their musicality. Historical horrors return with altered emotional coloration, as though the unconscious were remixing memory itself. The effect resembles wandering through a ballroom erected atop a mass grave while old love songs continue to play from another room. Kaiser understands that ideology rarely survives through terror alone. It survives because it learns how to dance.

INDEX’s timely release restores these monumental works with extraordinary care, allowing contemporary viewers to encounter something startlingly singular within the history of essay cinema and found footage experimentation. Kaiser’s achievement extends beyond political critique into something far more difficult to articulate. He reveals a battleground between revelation and hypnosis. The moving image can illuminate consciousness or dissolve it. Projection becomes a moral event.

Perhaps the most haunting aspect of Kaiser’s films lies in their refusal to reassure. They offer no triumphant distance from the past, no comforting implication that modern viewers stand safely outside these mechanisms of enchantment. The Reich appears here not as a historical anomaly but as concentrated dream logic, one expression of humanity’s endless appetite for coherence, purity, and transcendence. Kaiser peers directly into that appetite without blinking.

In the end, we are left with the peculiar silence that follows after language has exhausted its disguises. One begins to sense history not as chronology but as atmosphere, something breathed unconsciously across generations. Kaiser reminds us that civilizations often perish long before their buildings collapse. They decay first in metaphor, in tempo, in the stories they tell themselves while marching toward catastrophe with radiant smiles upon their faces. And when the masks fall away, the skeletons left behind look no different than those of their victims.

Andy Emler: There Is Another Way (RJAL 397053)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Emler piano
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Eric Echampard drums
Recorded July 17-18 and mixed July 21-22, 2026, by Gérard de Haro at Studios La Buissonne
Mastering by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studios
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by La Compagnie aime l’air, license to La Buissonne Label
Artistic director Gérard de Haro for La Buissonne Label
Release date: March 20, 2026

The second release on the La Buissonne label for 2026 returns to the ever-fertile terrain of pianist Andy Emler, whose singular compositional language has flourished across a wide range of ensembles, though perhaps nowhere with such distilled intimacy as in this trio alongside bassist Claude Tchamitchian and drummer Eric Echampard. Together, they move as a migratory organism, each gesture altering the trajectory of the next. The album unfolds as a study in divergence itself, a meditation on paths abandoned, rediscovered, then illuminated from impossible angles.

The title track arrives almost imperceptibly, soft-footed and lantern-lit. Piano chords sway between emotional climates, each voicing carrying the grain of uncertainty, as though Emler were testing the architecture of the room before fully stepping inside it. An arco bass line threads through the composition like smoke curling beneath a locked door, while cymbals glint overhead with the brittle shimmer of winter sunlight on river ice. Once Echampard enters in earnest, the horizon widens dramatically. Space itself appears to dilate. The trio suddenly resembles a flock lifting from dark water, each member catching a separate current while remaining bound to the same invisible compass. What emerges is trust of the highest order, proceeding with the calm authority of a river knowing precisely where the mountain ends.

Now that the emotional topography has been revealed, “Incipit” exhales into quieter territory. Its brevity carries the sensation of standing alone in a hallway after difficult news has settled into the walls. Emler allows silence to hover with unusual dignity. The pauses themselves seem composed, alive with suspended meaning. One begins to understand that this album concerns interior motion just as deeply as physical momentum. Beneath the trio’s precision lives something bruised, searching, profoundly human.

The cleverly titled “Drums habits die hard” pivots into kinetic terrain, giving Echampard ample room to fracture and reassemble pulse with characteristic elasticity. His rhythms stagger forward with the elegant imbalance of someone learning how to walk after catastrophe. Against this, Emler builds spiraling ostinatos that seem to rotate around hidden gravitational centers. The trio’s discipline becomes especially vivid here. Apparent hesitations reveal themselves as calculated feints. Sudden detours bloom into new emotional districts. The music behaves as memory itself, nonlinear yet uncannily coherent, forever discovering side streets beneath familiar maps. Sharp punctuation dissolves into tenderness without warning. Intimacy arrives carrying the scent of iron and rain.

Tchamitchian’s groundwork in “Enough,” opening with a magnificently tensile solo, feels painted in oil pastel and charcoal, dense with texture yet vulnerable to the touch. Emler enters carefully, his phrases drifting as chalk dust suspended in late afternoon light. A darker current gradually surfaces beneath the lyricism. Here the trio sketches the anatomy of dissolution, perhaps the ending of a relationship, perhaps the collapse of an older self that can no longer survive intact. One hears exhaustion breathing through the harmonies. Turmoil swells and recedes in long tidal motions until a fragile equilibrium returns. Survival becomes its own muted form of grace.

“The hard way” wrestles directly with the scars left behind. The writing tightens into intricate knots, rhythmic and harmonic tensions pulling against one another. Yet the trio never loses sight of release. Their improvisations carry the rough wisdom of travelers who understand that endurance rarely arrives adorned with triumph. Sometimes revelation limps into view wearing the clothes of failure. Sometimes conviction resembles solitude for a very long time. By the piece’s conclusion, the music has shed its bitterness and uncovered something steadier beneath it, an earned resilience untouched by sentimentality.

A brief interlude follows in “There is our way,” turning the pockets of expectation inside out. Private languages become briefly audible. Half-formed melodies drift through the composition as fragments of overheard prayer. The trio appears to glance at itself from a distance, examining the circuitry that has allowed this collective voice to endure through years of shared intuition and risk.

All of which leads naturally toward the apex of “Mess around the mood.” Deep piano arpeggios unfurl beside soaring arco passages that seem to lift the room several inches off its foundation. Expansive lyricism narrows into inward meditation, delicate cymbal textures flickering at the center of it all. Then comes the resolution, luminous and slow-burning, carrying the quiet exhilaration of dawn arriving after sleeplessness.

By the end, the title, There Is Another Way, reveals itself as more than a phrase of encouragement. It becomes a philosophical proposition. Emler and his trio seem less interested in certainty than in permeability, in the possibility that every apparent conclusion conceals an undiscovered passage. The music rejects the tyranny of fixed direction. It listens for hidden entrances beneath the mechanical repetitions that quietly govern ordinary life. Another way may not promise comfort or redemption in any simplistic sense. Rather, it suggests that existence itself remains unfinished, endlessly revisable, alive with corridors still dark enough to surprise us.

Judith Berkson: Thee They Thy (ECM 2741)

| Tyran Grillo

Judith Berkson
Thee They Thy

Judith Berkson voice, piano
Trevor Dunn double bass
Gerald Cleaver drums
Recorded July 2021
Oktaven Audio Studio
Mount Vernon, NY
Engineer: Ryan Streber
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 24, 2026

Mezzo-soprano, pianist, composer, and improviser Judith Berkson returns to ECM with a compelling new trio project. Conceptual art, liturgical inquiry, chamber abstraction, and jazz formalism: each arrives carrying its own gravity, yet none bends submissively toward a central identity. To call Berkson “multifaceted” feels insufficient, flat in a way her music refuses to be. These practices do not orbit a core. They are neighboring rooms illuminated at different hours of the day. If her 2010 solo album Oylam fashioned a private syntax from fractured song, Thee They Thy inhabits the classical jazz trio format as though entering an ancestral home whose walls still remember fire. Longtime associate Gerald Cleaver joins on drums, alongside new recruit, bassist Trevor Dunn, making his ECM debut with the calm authority of someone stepping into a river already moving beneath his feet.

The album opens with “Slow,” a through-composed prelude that reveals itself with the cold shimmer of arithmetic carved into glass. Beneath its measured surfaces lies an unguarded study of human behavior and the invisible fissures where our most sacred opportunities collapse under the weight of hesitation. Berkson’s voice enters neither as narrator nor confessor. Rather, it touches every object it describes without claiming ownership of any of them. Her words retain an open voltage, charged enough to bring interpretation to its knees. Dissonances bloom at the edges of the arrangement as bruises darkening beneath pale skin, while the trio advances through the piece with the patience of astronomers mapping a dying star.

Then comes “V’shamru,” and the atmosphere pivots completely, as though the record has opened a hidden window inside itself. Berkson’s original cantorial song tears through the stale fabric of expectation, allowing something ancient and inward to cross our eyeline unscathed. Her voice recedes slightly into shadow, gathering resonance from depths untouched by performance instinct. The modal pianism moves tidally, lifting and withdrawing with ritual precision, while Dunn’s arco bass offers a second pair of lungs. For a fleeting instant, one hears an accidental ghost of Chopin’s “Minute Waltz,” though the resemblance dissolves just as quickly into stranger territory, somewhere between prayer and mirage. The words orient the music without pinning it down. Easts and wests gather around the instruments’ norths and souths, forming a compass that points nowhere stable, nowhere singular.

“Torque” returns the listener to geometric terrain. Berkson’s note choices leap and contort like ladders folding back into themselves, each rung briefly becoming a horizon before disappearing. Built around improvisations on 12-tone rows, the piece visualizes cognition in motion, thought discovering fresh corridors while the walls rearrange themselves. Cleaver’s drumming behaves almost tectonically here, creating subtle pressures beneath the trio’s surface language, while Dunn anchors the abstraction with a presence that feels carved from volcanic stone.

“Dust” follows with startling restraint. Based on 19th-century harmonic language yet rendered through a minimalist lens, it carries the quiet devastation of an emptied ballroom after the candles have consumed themselves. Every chord seems suspended in the air a moment too long, as though uncertain whether to continue existing. Berkson understands silence as a living material. She places it beside sound the way a painter leaves bare canvas exposed, permitting absence to complete the image.

“Cleav,” the lone non-Berkson composition, offers Gerald Cleaver a solitary expanse in which rhythm becomes autobiography. His solo drumming circles through traditions without settling permanently inside any of them. Earth tones dominate the piece. One hears soil breaking beneath rain, wood splintering under pressure, iron cooling after contact with flame. The piece possesses a rare humility. Nothing seeks transcendence. Everything seeks honesty. Even at its most expansive, the performance maintains the intimacy of someone speaking quietly to themselves in a dark field.

“Notice,” with its insistent refrain, is the album’s pulse point, while the scat-inspired title track reveals Berkson at her most untethered. Her vocalizations fracture syntax into pure muscular expression. Aphasia becomes a kind of integrity here, a refusal to allow meaning the comfort of fixed borders. Beneath her, the rhythm section creates a living lattice around the piano, supporting angular phrases as they skip and recoil through chains of miniature ascensions.

“Amerika” arrives as a vast instrumental plain of shifting sands and mirage heat. Without voice, the trio communicates through contour alone, and the silence left by absent lyrics becomes strangely eloquent. Dunn contributes one of the record’s most tender passages during his solo. The music evokes impressions without illustrating them directly. Empty highways at dusk. Electrical hum beneath motel signage. The loneliness of fluorescent light.

Voice and text return in “Slowly Walk Into It,” freely improvised alongside Berkson’s piano. The result resembles an anthem for unseen presences, the peripheral shadows trailing human life with patient hunger. Her singing here feels startlingly mortal. Words emerge half-formed, carrying the fragility of thoughts overheard inside dreams. Lastly, in “Sated,” stepwise motions drift through the scales while the vocal lines hover weightlessly above them, neither ascending nor descending so much as evaporating.

Throughout the album, Berkson never conceals her vulnerabilities. She wears them openly, transforming fracture into protection, uncertainty into method. Many singers pursue purity as though it were evidence of transcendence. Berkson seeks the sound of a soul rubbing against its own limitations.

And then there is the title. Three pronouns orbiting one another without grammatical completion, each gesturing toward identity while dissolving certainty around who speaks and who is spoken to. The sequence feels devotional and fragmented at once, intimate enough for liturgy, unstable enough for philosophy. Perhaps Berkson understands personhood itself as a kind of unfinished chord, forever shifting between self, other, and the unnamed force binding both together. Language spends centuries attempting to stabilize the human experience through categories and declarations. Music witnesses how quickly those structures soften in the presence of feeling. By the album’s end, Thee They Thy resembles a doorway left slightly open in the middle of the night, revealing nothing clearly, yet altering the entire shape of the darkness around it.

Elina Duni/Rob Luft: Reaching for the Moon (ECM 2866)

| Tyran Grillo

Elina Duni
Rob Luft
Reaching for the Moon

Elina Duni voice, percussion
Rob Luft guitars, electronics
Recorded June 2025 at Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Cover photo: Jean-Guy Lathuilière
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 24, 2026

Stranger is the heart
In the shadows it has grown apart
Lonely dancer, lonely lark
Your song is lost, adrift from the start

For her sixth foray into the ever-expanding territory of ECM records, singer Elina Duni returns alongside her most intuitive counterpart, guitarist Rob Luft, shaping a shared breath sustained across time. This meeting dispenses with the quartet format of their previous studio collaborations and settles into a two-person orbit, where every gesture carries even greater weight of intention. The result is a listening experience in which language itself becomes a constellation, each tongue a different shade of twilight, flickering against the dark. Italian, French, English, Albanian, and Arabic drift as migrating birds, presence the invisible translator between them.

The title track by Irving Berlin already bears the fingerprints of history, yet here it sheds its familiarity. Luft lays down chords that feel weathered by recall, soft as footsteps on a path that no longer exists, while Duni’s voice rises in quiet illumination. There is a sensation of recognition without name, of sketching a horizon that recedes as one approaches, inviting pursuit rather than arrival.

From this invocation, “Cammina Cammina,” by Italian singer-songwriter Pino Daniele, deepens the album’s nocturnal terrain. The old man it pictures wandering through the past becomes less a character than a mirror held up to the listener’s own sediment of experience. Duni traces his solitude with exquisite restraint, allowing each syllable to carry the weight of absence. The moonlight here feels tangible, something one might gather in the hands only to watch it dissolve. Luft bends toward fragility, his phrases hovering at the edge of dissolution.

The duo’s thematic commitment is further unraveled in “Les Berceaux.” This setting of René-François Sully-Prudhomme to the music of Gabriel Fauré embodies the rocking motion of its title (French for “The Cradles”), allowing us respite in the warmth of a lullaby. Speaking of lullabies, we are treated to two further examples of this ancient art. First is “Leili Lullaby” by Mahsa Vahdat, the astronomically talented Persian singer in whose lineage I might easily place Duni in terms of psychological acuity and somatic transferrence, breathes with a rhythm all its own. Second is “Sleep Safe and Warm” by Krzysztof Komeda, a haunting piece of art from Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby that, despite being relieved of its cinematic veneer, reminds us that a mother’s song is sung only to become a memory in her eventual absence. The latter is paired with “Yumeji’s Theme” by Shigeru Umebayashi, which references the 1991 Seijun Suzuki film, Yumeji. Both are offered with Duni’s voice as pure instrument.

Two Kosovar songs introduce the pulse of the earth. “Ani More Nuse” conveys vitality, its rhythmic foundation grounding the album’s more ethereal tendencies. Duni’s percussion adds a tactile dimension, a reminder of the body’s presence within this otherwise weightless landscape. “Zambaku I Prizrenit” by composer Akil Koci blooms with a different energy, its melodic contours unfolding under an unseen sun. Luft navigates its modal terrain with a sense of curiosity.

Three originals serve as emotional waypoints within this journey. “Foolish Flame” flickers with restless energy, its chromatic lines tracing the unpredictable path of desire. There is vulnerability here, though it is not offered as confession but as an open question. “Magnolia” answers with certainty, a rootedness that feels earned rather than assumed. The voice carries a newfound steadiness, an acceptance of the self’s shifting contours. “Your Arms” extends this feeling outward, exploring the architecture of intimacy. Luft’s solo glows with the warmth of a fire one might sit beside in the depths of winter.

The inevitable farewell comes in the form of “Lonely Woman.” The Ornette Coleman standard, paired with lyrics by Margo Guryan, brings us back into the fold of night, allowing the hesitations of life to wander free from the trappings of the flesh, so that they might achieve the spiritual journeying that human ways so often tarnish.

Throughout, there are moments when Duni abandons words altogether, allowing vocalese to emerge as a self-sustaining channel of communication. These passages offer glimpses into fragments of thought and feeling that resist translation. Luft’s subtly altered arpeggios lay down tectonic plates beneath them, creating a sense of movement even in stillness. It is here that the album reveals its deepest truth, not as a statement but as an experience.

Ultimately, we are left with a sensation akin to standing beneath a sky so vast it erases the boundaries of the self. Indeed, music invites a willingness to dissolve into something larger, where the distinction between listener and sound becomes irrelevant. What remains is the fragile yet enduring glow of a star whose light continues long after its source has vanished.

Peter Tscherkassky: Exquisite Ecstasies (INDEX 048)

| Tyran Grillo

Images often arrive clothed in certainty. They glide across the eye with a quiet authority, suggesting that what is seen is whole and already understood. The world appears to organize itself within the frame, its contradictions softened, its fractures sealed beneath a luminous surface. Yet this coherence is a delicate fiction. Beneath it, something restless persists, a tremor that resists being made smooth. Peter Tscherkassky’s cinema lives in that tremor. His creations expose the fragility of suspended disbelief, allowing the image to stutter in recognizance.

Emerging from the lineage of the Austrian avant-garde, Tscherkassky has always treated film as both medium and wound. His practice, grounded in the physical manipulation of celluloid, fevers his gaze. He dissects footage with a tactile intensity, pushing it toward states of convulsion and rupture.

In Aderlaß (Blood-Letting, 1981), the screen opens into a darkness that feels less like absence than anticipation. Sound arrives first, jagged and insistent, as if the apparatus itself were clearing its throat. The question “What language do you speak?” reverberates not as inquiry but as accusation. Communication falters, dissolving into laughter that feels almost violent. Here, the moving image becomes an act of self-interrogation, a ritual of undoing. The invocation of “murder as the only real artwork” lingers not as provocation alone but as a symptom of artistic despair. Blood seeps into the frame, not metaphor but material. One begins to wonder whether movement produces film or whether film produces movement. What remains in this interrogation is a flicker that feels terminal, witness to its own extinction.

With Liebesfilm (Film of Love, 1982), Tscherkassky turns to intimacy, albeit stripped of fulfillment. A kiss approaches endlessly, rehearsed 522 times without consummation. Desire becomes mechanical, an algorithm of longing caught in a loop. Each repetition erodes meaning yet intensifies sensation. Love reveals itself as a structure of hesitation, a choreography of almosts. The bodies lean toward each other, again and again, yet never arrive. What should be a culmination becomes a suspension. The male gaze lingers in that gap, feeding on deferral. Lips remain unlocked, not out of restraint but because closure would end the system that sustains them.

Urlaubsfilm (Holiday Film, 1983) complicates the act of looking more directly. A woman moves through a field, undressing with a gesture that might initially invite voyeuristic comfort. But then, her gaze meets the camera, and with it, the viewer. The illusion fractures. To look is suddenly to be seen looking. The image begins to mutate and open portals within itself. A second frame emerges like an eyelid lifting from the surface. Gradually, visibility recedes. Flesh dissolves into abstraction. What remains is not the body but its residue, held precariously in memory. The gaze loses its object and confronts its own voraciousness.

By the time we reach tabula rasa (1989), the gaze has become predatory. Cowboys lurk in the brush, archetypes of surveillance and control, their attention sharpened to a point. Yet what they see refuses coherence. The image slips and folds into textures that evade recognition. Skin becomes landscape. Cloth becomes terrain. The female body, when it appears, resists fixation. She is neither subject nor object but a shifting locus of desire that cannot be pinned down. The camera reveals itself as complicit, even parasitic, driven by a hunger that consumes its own vision.

This trajectory finds a kind of culmination in The Exquisite Corpus (2015), a work that gathers decades of experimentation into a dense, almost tidal structure. Drawing from found footage, including a 1960s nudist film, Tscherkassky constructs a landscape where bodies and film stock merge into a single unstable organism. A couple sails toward an island, though their arrival feels illusory. A thunderclap fractures the image before frames multiply, invert, and overlay themselves in a choreography of excess. Flesh becomes pattern. Movement becomes echo. Erotic gestures lose their charge, not through repression but through saturation. The more the body is shown, the less it can be possessed.

Natural elements intrude. Leaves, flowers, woven textures. These are not mere decorations but reminders that cinema, too, is subject to decay and transformation, even as it pulses like a living thing. Tscherkassky’s frame-by-frame method becomes a form of devotion, an insistence on tactile reality. In an era of digital smoothness, he retains the scars of the past, resisting the flattening of experience into seamless flow.

Across these works, the POV is never stable. It shifts from voyeur to participant, from observer to accomplice. It reveals itself as constructed, fractured, and, above all, unreliable. Tscherkassky implicates the viewer in the act of looking, exposing the desires and violences embedded within it. What emerges is not simply a critique of representation but a reconfiguration of perception itself. The films suggest that seeing is always entangled with absence, that every image carries within it the trace of what cannot be shown.

And perhaps this is where Tscherkassky’s work ultimately leads beyond myth and beyond even the body. The gaze, stripped of its certainties, becomes something quieter and more elusive. Not a tool of mastery, nor a site of pleasure, but a fragile relation to the unknown. To look is to risk losing the ground beneath perception. To see is to encounter the limits of seeing. In that encounter, something almost philosophical stirs. Not an answer, not a conclusion, but a question that lingers like an afterimage, asking what it means to inhabit a world that cannot be fully brought into view.

Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin: ITERAE

| Tyran Grillo

When entering ITERAE, we realize that it has already entered us. In this realm of post-glitch and digital bliss, an unsettling current draws us inward, threading its way through our attention until we no longer stand outside it. By the time orientation falters, we have already been absorbed into its matrix. This first collaboration between Joseph Branciforte and Jozef Dumoulin feels less like a beginning than a recognition, as though the music had been forming elsewhere long before it reached our ears. The eight-part work makes room for whatever meanings we bring to it, yet those meanings do not remain intact. They splinter, becoming granular, each shard holding its own quiet tremor.

Although the sounds are free-flowing and, for all intents and purposes, “abstract,” something organic guides their unfolding. There is a sense of inevitability that breathes through the music, as if each gesture were the continuation of an unseen process. Both performers have examined the inner workings of the Fender Rhodes with an intimacy that borders on anatomical devotion. Branciforte approaches from a cerebral vantage, tracing circuitry and signal, while Dumoulin leans into resonance and touch. Their shared immersion in improvisation suggests a practice that listens as much as it acts. Electroacoustic molecules begin to feel like carriers of a subtler vitality, and what emerges, though rooted in the present, carries a strange immunity to time.

With an instrument each at their disposal, they shape and process their sounds in distinct ways, allowing differences to coexist without friction. Branciforte’s live editing system introduces another dimension, folding moments back into themselves so that traces of what has just passed continue to sing within what is becoming. The effect is neither nostalgic nor recursive in a conventional sense. Memory behaves more like a living texture, constantly reabsorbed into the present. Across 70 minutes, a broader tapestry takes form, one that does not declare its structure outright yet reveals a continuity of reception. By the end, something in us aligns more closely with itself, though the nature of that alignment resists easy articulation.

What’s astonishingly heartfelt about this record is the unforced way in which it unfolds. Each shift of color, light, and texture feels intentional without ever seeming imposed. The music often takes on a visual quality, as though it were painting in slow motion across an inner field of perception. At certain points, the effect is hymnal, repetition carrying a quiet sense of ritual that feels open rather than doctrinal. Elsewhere, the atmosphere turns distinctly technological, articulating patterns that seem native to machines yet remain accessible to human feeling. While Branciforte and Dumoulin could easily construct overwhelming densities, their attention turns toward the interstices, the fine cracks where detail becomes a form of revelation.

Skips and starts establish a kind of pulse, though one that resists regularity. In the spaces where expectation wavers, something almost biological begins to stir, hovering between unease and resolution, never fully committing to either. As the sonic architecture takes on a more metallic sheen, a subtle shift occurs in its sensory character. There is a taste to it, faintly coppery, as if the sound itself were brushing against the elemental conditions from which life emerges. This grounding in the fundamental gives the less anchored passages a surprising sense of familiarity.

The continuity of the work remains one of its quiet marvels. Emotional currents, physical responses, and fragments of memory intertwine in ways that feel both intimate and expansive. The initial unsettlement does not disappear, yet it softens as the music offers points of illumination along the way. There is always a sense of contact, as though the sound remains attuned to our capacity to receive it. Nothing is pushed beyond reach, even when clarity seems just out of grasp.

When rhythms become more defined, they resemble presences moving alongside one another rather than structures imposed from above. Listening begins to feel like watching language dissolve into color, each shade carrying a meaning that cannot be translated back into words. Melodic gestures arise from the digital substrate as complete entities, already aware of their own contours. Direction loses its usual significance, and the distinction between forward and backward begins to blur.

Near the end, distortion enters with a subtle insistence, though it never threatens to overwhelm. Instead, it refines the material, drawing out a clarity that feels paradoxically linked to decay. Each iteration preserves a certain purity, suggesting an affection for entropy rather than a resistance to it.

Duo Gazzana: Prokofiev/Pärt/Schnittke (ECM New Series 2854)

| Tyran Grillo

Duo Gazzana
Prokofiev/Pärt/Schnittke

Natascia Gazzana violin
Raffaella Gazzana piano
Recorded February 2025, Reitstadel Neumarkt
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Mixed September 2025
by Manfred Eicher and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Cover photo: Michael Kenna
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 17, 2026

Since 2011, Duo Gazzana have occupied a rarefied space within the ECM New Series realm, where sound is uncovered as a relic from beneath layers of listening. Across their previous recordings, the sisters Natascia and Raffaella have cultivated a language of intimacy that resists spectacle, drawing the ear inward, toward a threshold where precision meets vulnerability. Their artistry thrives not on assertion but on trust, a quiet confidence that what is essential will endure without artifice.

This latest album extends that ethos while threading it through a program shaped by endurance, fracture, and the fragile grace of survival. The chosen composers speak across time not through stylistic unity but through shared confrontation with hardship. As Stefano Carucci observes in his booklet essay, these figures, despite their divergent origins and trajectories, all encountered forms of sociopolitical suffering that threatened to silence them, and yet found in music a passageway beyond constraint. What emerges, then, is not merely a collection of works but a meditation on resilience. Each piece becomes a chamber where pressure resonates.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)
Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in f minor, op. 80

Written under the oppressive weight of the Stalinist regime, interrupted by war, and completed in 1946, this sonata bears the imprint of a mind navigating both external censorship and internal unrest. The opening Andante assai does not so much begin as seep into being. The piano murmurs from its lower depths, a shadowed resonance that seems to remember something it cannot name. The violin responds with a tremor, not quite a voice yet no longer silenced. Their exchange unfolds like a fragile correspondence between distant selves, each phrase arriving slightly worn by travel.

Textures accumulate slowly, their friction almost tactile. One senses thought grinding against itself. Then, unexpectedly, a glint of irony surfaces, a crooked smile glimpsed through fog. The piano drifts into an impressionistic shimmer, while the violin traces an erratic line above, a figure balancing along a fence that refuses stability. A final whisper of pizzicato settles the air before the Allegro brusco asserts its presence, not with brute force but with a taut clarity that holds its ground. The Gazzanas render this movement with astonishing poise, maintaining a paradoxical separation. It feels as though violin and piano inhabit parallel rooms, their dialogue conducted through walls that neither obstruct nor reveal entirely.

The subsequent Andante opens a window. A stream appears, modest and unassuming, its flow uninterrupted by spectacle. Yet even here, unease lingers beneath the surface. The music twists subtly, its beauty edged with something watchful. By the time the Allegrissimo erupts, the earlier calm reveals itself as prelude rather than respite. Motion accelerates into a language of leaps and surges, returning to earlier motifs not as closure but as transformation. The ending resists finality. It suggests continuation beyond hearing, as though the sonata persists in some unseen dimension, spiraling outward long after the last vibration fades.

After such intensity, the arrival of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel feels like stepping into a space where time loosens its grip. This work, among the first articulations of Pärt’s tintinnabuli style, invites a relinquishing of self. The performers become vessels rather than agents, their gestures stripped of excess until only essence remains. The piano’s arpeggios unfold with crystalline patience, while the violin sustains a line that seems to hover between presence and absence.

In this interpretation, the Gazzanas uncover a depth that resists articulation. The music breathes within a threshold where the physical dissolves into the ineffable. It carries the faint suggestion of something sacred, not declared but intimated. Each note appears as if reflected in another, a mirror that does not duplicate but reveals hidden dimensions. The simplicity is deceptive. Beneath it lies an infinite regress, each tone containing the seed of another, extending endlessly into silence.

Prokofiev
Five Melodies, op. 35a

Originally conceived as vocalises for soprano and piano in 1920 and later transcribed for violin, these miniatures form a bridge between tradition and innovation. They are concise yet expansive, each piece a self-contained world that flickers into being and vanishes before it can be fully grasped. The Gazzanas approach them with a sensitivity that honors their dual nature.

The second melody stands out in particular. Its opening pizzicato gestures evoke a tactile immediacy, as though the music were being plucked directly from the air. The flowing ostinato that follows transforms this grounded beginning into something buoyant, almost dance-like. Yet the energy never settles into predictability. It shifts, folds inward, then reemerges with altered contours. The final Andante non troppo balances restraint and exuberance, its voice alternating between whisper and exclamation. The conclusion does not resolve so much as dissolve into a state of luminous equilibrium.

Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998)
Gratulationsrondo

Schnittke’s polystylistic language introduces a different kind of tension. Here, contrasts are not reconciled but allowed to coexist in uneasy proximity. Familiar gestures are tinged with unease, while dissonance acquires an unexpected radiance. The Gazzanas navigate this terrain with a delicacy that reveals the work’s inner vulnerability. Beneath its shifting surfaces lies a candid exposure, as though the music has shed its defenses and stands unguarded before the listener.

What ultimately defines Duo Gazzana’s performance throughout this album is a quality that might be called bareness, though the term hardly captures its fullness. Their playing does not impose meaning. It creates space for meaning to emerge. Each phrase feels unencumbered by expectation, as if the music were discovering itself in real time. Their sisterly connection is evident, yet it is not the focal point. Rather, it is the organic foundation upon which a more profound dialogue unfolds.

And perhaps this is where the album leaves us. Not with answers, nor even with questions, but with a shift in how we attend to sound itself. These works, shaped by hardship and carried forward through fragile persistence, remind us that music is not merely an object of listening. It is a mode of being, a way in which experience transforms into something that can be shared without being diminished. In the end, what lingers is not the echo of suffering but the realization that even in silence, something continues to resonate. Whether we call it memory, spirit, or simply presence, it carries us forward with hope.

The Darkness That Dreams Itself Awake: Reflections on Scott Barley’s Sleep Has Her House

| Tyran Grillo

Before anything gathers into form, there is a trembling that does not yet belong to sight, a faint stirring within shadow, as though feeling out the air. What emerges is neither absence nor void, but a density without edges, a field in which something waits without voicing itself. Out of this condition, images condense, hesitate, and drift, carrying with them the sense that they could just as easily recede.

Sleep Has Her House unfolds within this threshold. Rather than presenting a world, it allows one to waver into partial visibility, as though seeing were a fragile event, never fully secured. Movement breathes in long, patient intervals. Light gathers slowly, then loosens, while darkness continues as part of a rhythm with no discernible beginning, only a quiet persistence.

To think of images as things that simply show is to miss the instability at their core. They gather surfaces where perception bends, folds, and slips into itself. What appears carries no fixed boundary. Forms arrive as tremors rather than certainties, flickering into provisional being through an uneasy negotiation between light, duration, and attention.

Filmmaker Scott Barley’s practice is one of attunement, dispersing attention across a field where nothing claims priority. No figure guides the gaze, no arc gathers momentum. Encounters drift into one another with an intimacy that remains strangely indifferent, as though what unfolds were aware of our presence yet entirely unconcerned with it. Nature and cosmology linger less as themes than as atmospheres, conditions in which images gather and dissolve.

The camera ceases to function as an instrument directed outward and instead becomes embedded within what it perceives, a reflexive organ sensing its own act of sensing. Vision loses its hierarchy. Every element hovers on the same trembling plane, significance and insignificance phasing without resistance.

Disorientation never quite arrives. Instead, what fades is the assumption that orientation was ever stable to begin with. In astronomy, averted vision allows faint stars to appear by shifting the gaze slightly aside. Direct sight proves too blunt, too saturated with expectation. The peripheral regions of the eye receive what the center cannot hold.

These images ask for that oblique attention. Meaning glimmers at the margins, appearing only to recede. Darkness becomes both method and substance, a space to inhabit rather than penetrate. Within it, forms hesitate into being: a valley pulses with a faint, unstable strobe as the sensor strains against its limits; mist thickens into a surface that reflects without resolving; an owl lingers in a silence that stretches until it hums.

Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt finds an unexpected echo here. Each organism inhabits a world shaped by its relations, a world lived rather than possessed. The apparatus begins to suggest such a realm of its own, raising the question of what it perceives when left alone, and what relations form between grain and the slow erosion of light.

Shot over four days on an iPhone 6, then extended across 16 months through post-production processes that blur the line between motion, stillness, and drawn intervention, the film becomes a layered field. Each image carries the residue of multiple gestures. These layers unfold from within, as though the image were recalling itself into being.

Time resists compression. Events do not assert themselves; instead, conditions gather and disperse. Thus, the viewer is drawn into a circuit where perception gives rise to the image, and the image, in turn, alters perception, an exchange without clear origin or conclusion.

A sense of haunting settles as atmosphere. Light withdraws, leaving behind zones usually passed over behind closed eyes: afterimages that flicker at the threshold of rest, a faint luminescence that persists even when illumination seems absent. These phenomena have always been present, quietly registered and quickly dismissed. Here, dismissal becomes impossible.

The familiar begins to shift under the pressure of sustained attention. A waterfall emerges first as a distant murmur, then as a slow insistence that feels remembered rather than heard. Rock opens its wound, receiving and releasing in the same movement. Water, shadow, and something that cannot be named blend in fragile equilibrium.

Two animals gaze into the dark. Their presence offers no explanation. Their calls dissolve into wind, into distance, into a trace that lingers without resolution. A horse’s eye fills the frame, rain sliding across its surface in delicate, transient paths. The gaze passes through or beyond, as though we occupy a position that cannot be fully perceived.

Trees rise and fall in respiration, each trunk a vertical inhalation, each branch an exhaled uncertainty tracing the air. A lifeless deer rests with a stillness that refuses transformation, its form functioning as a density of matter returning to quiet dispersion. The forest offers no acknowledgment. It neither absorbs nor rejects; it simply continues, carrying within it the slow work of decay and renewal, processes so gradual they dissolve into a single continuous gesture.

Above, stars fracture the sky into granular tremblings. Clouds drift with a weight that feels almost intentional, as though bearing something that cannot arrive, their movement both aimless and exact. Then the sun breaks through with pressure, an overwhelming saturation that presses against the limits of form.

Night returns in long, measured intervals, gathering thought the way night gathers moisture, condensing it into something fragile and momentary. Each withdrawal of light folds back into its own interior. What follows is a thickening.

Sound moves through these images as a quiet force of disturbance. Wind unsettles the trees, bending them into slow, reluctant gestures. Water expands beyond the limits of any attempts to contain it. The camera listens. Light becomes something that resonates rather than reveals. Seeing drifts toward a tactile sensing in which vision no longer dominates but pulses and recedes without hierarchy.

Nothing resolves into memory as something fixed or retrievable. What remains is a condition. The world now feels less certain, as though chemically softened, forms loosening their agreement to remain what they are.

Somewhere just beyond attention, something persists. It does not gather into shape or ask to be known. It lingers as a force without location, a presence that surrounds the space where we might be. It watches without eyes, listens without ears, as if perception itself had slipped free of its objects and continued, alone, in the dark.

Phil Solomon: Still Raining, Still Dreaming – Film meets video game (INDEX 054)

| Tyran Grillo

It is tempting, almost reflexive, to speak of an artist’s output as a body of work, as though its existence depends on assembly, arrangement, and, ultimately, externalization. Meanwhile, Phil Solomon’s cinema metabolizes audiovisuality at its most internal. His films are residues of contact, impressions left where perception has brushed against the world and recoiled. They seep from life, haunted by the fragile choreography between presence and disappearance.

Born in 1954, Solomon came of age artistically at SUNY Binghamton in the 1970s, studying under figures such as Ken Jacobs and Peter Kubelka, whose engagements with the materiality of film left an indelible mark. His own sensibility, however, slips beyond questions of influence. It pursues a kind of inverse archaeology, digging toward a vanishing point of the medium. Though often associated with found footage, even that term falters under scrutiny. As Eve Heller suggests, what he found remained inseparable from what had already been lost. His images carry the weight of retrieval, though never restoration. They arrive wounded, already slipping away.

This INDEX edition, gathering his final works, reveals a fascination with largely digital environments while remaining tethered to the tactile ghosts of celluloid. Solomon’s engagement with video games, particularly the Grand Theft Auto franchise, delineates sites of profound reorientation. These virtual landscapes, designed for velocity and spectacle, are slowed, hollowed, and made to mourn what he once called “the inevitable ineffable,” a phrase that captures a peculiar sort of alchemy. Seemingly disparate elements coalesce into something uncannily coherent, insofar as it exerts pressure toward a center that cannot be named.

Crossroad (2005) inaugurates this phase with an unresolved chord. GTA’s protagonist, CJ, drifts through rain and foliage, accompanied by an impossibly floating bouquet of flowers devoid of recipient. Everything hums faintly around him. Thunder cracks. A train sounds in the distance. Nothing answers his movement. He runs, stops, waits, stretches his limbs as if testing the fact of his own existence. The environment offers only indifferent signals. A bird crosses the sky. A plane cuts overhead. These nods to continuity are almost cruel, reminders that life persists elsewhere, just beyond reach.

Solomon’s collaborator for this project was his dear friend Mark LaPore, who died suddenly shortly after its completion. What follows in In Memoriam (Mark LaPore) unfolds as an extended meditation, stretched across three works drawing deeper from the well they tapped in GTA. In Rehearsals for Retirement, the digital realm saturates with grief. Rain falls with unnatural persistence. Acts are interrupted, deferred, dissolved into blackness before they can resolve into purpose. A hearse glides through fields where wheat stalks pierce its interior, a glitch that reads less like error and more like revelation. The laws of nature bend, fracture, and rearrange themselves, yet death remains unaltered, immovable, the single constant in a system otherwise given to distortion.

Last Days in a Lonely Place expands this desolation outward, layering fragments of dialogue from Rebel Without a Causeagainst a world emptied of its inhabitants. The cosmos looms with indifferent permanence. A cinema marquee stands blank, awaiting spectators who will never return. Figures drift toward one another but never meet, their trajectories misaligned by forces that remain unseen. Machines operate without operators. Vehicles sink without resistance. The environment continues going through the motions, stripped of intention. Meaning has migrated elsewhere, leaving behind a mere scaffolding of function.

In Still Raining, Still Dreaming, Solomon turns his gaze toward the overlooked margins of the game’s architecture. Spaces designed to be passed through become sites of prolonged attention. A magician performs for no one. Pedestrians move without identity, their individuality folded into patterns without flesh. Sound drifts in and out of earshot, marking an internal logic that resists interpretation yet insists on affect. What players once bypassed in pursuit of action becomes, under Solomon’s eye, the true locus of experience.

John Powers writes that these works mourn not only LaPore but also the passing of film as a material form, the replacement of chemistry with code. Solomon’s digital skins nevertheless bear the scars of physical media, their anomalies echoing the traumatic memory of scratches and burns in bygone emulsion layers. An underlying inquiry remains: What does it mean to fend for oneself in a context already at odds with itself?

This question finds a different articulation in Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow (2013), where Solomon turns to the Elder Scrolls universe of Skyrim, stripping away characters to leave behind a landscape without bloodshed. The voiceover, drawn from John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” drapes the eyes and ears in inexorable meditations. Snow falls. Mist gathers. A lone figure moves through a forest that seems to recede the more it is perceived. An icon whispering to itself, an object of contemplation that resists interpretation even as it invites it.

The Emblazoned Apparitions returns to analog processes, though not as a gesture of nostalgia. Here, a molecular transformation implodes, turning the familiar into abstraction (and vice versa). The tunnel motif recurs, suggestive of both passage and enclosure, a space that leads forward while folding inward. Film reveals itself as an artifact of entropy that documents what it records along with its own disintegration. Technology thus becomes inseparable from mortality, each frame a testament to impermanence.

Across these works, Solomon’s cinema resists containment. It offers no conventional narratives, yet it avoids pure abstraction. It occupies an unstable territory between states, hovering on the brink of recognition and dissolution. His legacy lies in a mode of attention, an insistence on lingering where others would move on, on dwelling within the unresolved.

To encounter these films is to be drawn into a space where time loosens its grip, where cause and effect give way to something more diffuse. In this sense, Solomon’s work persists as a kind of afterimage, a presence that remains even after the screen goes dark. Perhaps it resides there, in a space where seeing becomes indistinguishable from remembering, and remembering from forgetting, until even those distinctions dissolve into something more elemental, a flicker without origin, a trace without end.