Enno Poppe/Wolfgang Heiniger: Tonband

Album review

The year 2021 has been a good one for the piano-and-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, as the group released an album of recent music by the durable avant-garde experimenter Annea Lockwood, and now music by composers Enno Poppe and Wolfgang Heiniger, contributing one work each and one joint piece. The latter gives the album its title, and it offers a place to start with the music, which defines an intriguing intermediate space between acoustic and electronic music. The players of Yarn/Wire are oriented toward acoustic instruments, but they often interact with and manipulate the products of electronic sound sources. In Tonband, the group's two pianists alter sounds coming from the percussionists, captured by microphones. Framing this piece are an acoustic work, Poppe's two-movement Feld, which might as well be electronic, and a mostly electronic one, Heiniger's Neumond, where the pianists play MIDI keyboards. For listeners outside the avant-garde sphere, the music may have a rather forbidding exterior, but this album may be an ideal way into the surfaces and the issues of contemporary electronic-acoustic music.

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