Ben altri appunti di viaggio costituiscono la trama vocale e tematica del nuovo lavoro di Heiner Goebbels, affascinante e drammatico, pubblicato da Ecm in concomitanza con il suo settantesimo compleanno: A House of Call-My Imaginary Notebook. Auguri!
With A House of Call, Heiner Goebbels peels back his most significant layer of multimedia music for the stage. This self-styled “imaginary notebook” incorporates archival recordings of prayers, songs, and other speech acts into dialogic relationships with a full orchestra. Much of what we hear is old and anonymous, barely hanging by a thread of preservation and never imaginable in a concert setting. And yet, here it all is, wired together like some elaborate lie detector of our shared past, pinging with increasing frequency to signal every denial of complicity by proxy. Tempting as it might be to view such a project through an archaeological or ethnographic lens, to do so would strengthen the very contradictions it wishes to dilute in its reckonings of time and place. “The music is a direct response to the complexity and roughness of the voices” says Goebbels in his liner note, pointing also to the radiance thereof against the opacity of present traumas.