Trapist "ballroom"

On Ballroom, Viennese trio Trapist have developed an
unclassifiable sound that takes cues from the improvisation of acoustic jazz, the prepared instrumentation of avant-garde classical, and the disorienting sonic glitches of IDM. The album moves across all three areas of music without ever fully staking claim in any of them, but the transitions are slow enough
and fluid enough to rebuff any accusations of attention deficit
disorder. If anything, the album is an exercise in “Time Axis Manipulation,” a phrase that the group uses to title the 20-minute suite that comprises the album’s first two tracks.

“Time Axis Manipulation” begins with guitarist Martin Siewert attacking his acoustic like a percussion instrument, inserting between each chord gaps of silence lengthy enough to suggest Chinese water torture. Meanwhile, drummer Martin Brandlmayr plays his kit in an equally lackadaisical manner while using digital signal processing to control the decay and sustain of his playing. Because of such, the hissing of his cymbals tends to last long
after they physically stop vibrating. Double bassist Joe Williamson
bows his instrument to imitate the murmur of a tugboat, while Siewert leans his guitar against his amplifier to produce high-pitched feedback. All three musicians slowly work their playing into an amorphous lather in which interminable drones are juxtaposed with short, sharp blasts of aleatory noise. Even when the musicians start playing actual riffs they never agree on a meter, opting instead to sound like Tortoise at their mellowest with the rhythmic skeleton ripped out. The first part of the song eventually collapses into a mess of drones and motor-like noises. The second part of the song begins with three minutes of what would sound like traditional jazz vamping if the instruments weren’t run through enough digital triggers to make the song stutter and fold back in on itself. The suite concludes with avalanches of white noise supplanted by tribal thumps, like a radio broadcast of a drum circle experiencing technical difficulties.

The next two tracks, “Observations Took Place” and “The Meaning of
Flowers,” are the closest things to traditional songs that Ballroom has. On “Observations,” a series of whining synthesizers ascends and descends on top a minimal funk beat. The synthesizers eventually take over, forming a drone that gets progressively louder until the end of the song. On “Flowers,”
Brandlmayr’s drums take center stage, changing tone and timbre enough to sound as if he’s augmenting his kit with kitchen cutlery. Siewert uses an e-bow to strip his guitars of their attack and make them fade in and out of the mix.

Ballroom‘s 18-minute closing track, “For All the Time Spent in This Room,” is structured almost like “Time Axis Manipulation” in reverse. After three minutes of disorganized plinks, brushes and scrapes, the song turns into a nearly danceable tropical jazz odyssey led by Siewert’s lush and watery chords. Around the halfway mark, though, the song collapses once again into formlessness, with every strum, slide and drone coming out of Siewert’s guitar run through a series of epileptic clicks and cuts. The album ends just as it began, with Siewert inserting ever-longer gaps of
silence in between every chord until he finally gives in to the
nothingness.

As mellow as Trapist’s music might be, it will test your patience if
you’re not ready for it. The band’s commitment to drones, randomness, gadgetry and (most of all) doing things VERY, VERY SLOWLY will irritate most people who don’t already have a working knowledge of Thrill Jockey’s most experimental releases. While I was typing the review’s opening paragraphs, my mother
walked past me and said, “Sean, that sounds like somebody left an
appliance plugged in for far too long and needs to shut it off.” I, on the other hand, have actually fallen asleep to Ballroom many times, so your mileage may vary. All preferences aside, Trapist’s music stands boldly at the forefront of the melding of acoustic instrumentation and electronic manipulation, and it WILL reward listeners who are willing to immerse themselves in it.

---Sean Padilla

Label Website: http://www.thrilljockey.com