Man meets different difficulties and sufferings through his wandering. These are forces between which a continuous struggle is going on. He cannot control and preside over these forces. He is being tossed up and down, powerless, like snowflakes in the storm: chaotic thoughts and feelings, gladness and suffering, which flow without intermission like a river that has no beginning nor end. - Rózmann (from the programme notes for the 1984 premiere of the first seven stations).
Immense.............hellish...........difficult................exhausting..........to represent life's 'difficulties and sufferings' Akos Rozmann had to create a massive work and here it is..................the 'storm' of existence in the form of over six and a half hour's worth of sound.................and it is a struggle to grasp the work in its entirety.....the mind wanders, perhaps................wondering how it is possible to take in such a vast...............thing..........a beast..................a symphony of spliced, twisted, warped material which began as a five-minute tape piece for soprano singer and prepared piano to become this..............the ultimate in remixing raw ingredients...............reconfiguring, cutting, altering speeds, processing and improvising on a sampler keyboard...............how did Rozmann not go insane? He abandoned the project in 1980 having first used the traditional musique concrete technique, to start again in 1998 using new technology to rework the old material.......as if he could not escape what he had started..................trapped by its potential......it's endless potential..............what he saw in those grains of sound..............an eternal transformation.......the river 'that has no beginning nor end'!
Despite his willingness to entertain the idea of 'gladness' being part of our journey, there is little evidence here that Rozmann wished to represent a great deal of it.............no lengthy celebratory passages of the joy that life can bring to counterbalance the suffering.........no.......................we start in the two-part Property - Room................lost property room, perhaps, wherein would-be seekers of their lost souls appear with much wailing and groaning, accompanied by, amongst other things, the strings of that prepared piano plucked to the point of being shredded..........to determine the source of concrete sound is notoriously difficult, the point being metamorphosis into something else, of course....................here objects appear to collide, crash to the floor and be tortured until they change beyond recognition, reaching points of intense mutation around the halfway mark.............................................a stretching, creaking entity..........fragmented voices fly from ear-to-ear, barely human..............alone, at times, as if crying out for salvation.....there is enough in these two parts alone to occupy the listener for a very long time....and we have yet to experience The Contents and Life of the Black Pit, which is disturbing in the extreme..............harshly distorted, multi-layered vocals are phased in and out of the mix......ripped to shreds in a hell of cross-faded noise...................is that the crack of Satan's whip?
The Abandonment of Hell hardly offers relief from what has gone before.......................although there's a suggestion of calm to begin with through use of the soprano, a sombre mood is maintained.........that hellhound is still on your trail and will never go away...................it's as if Rozmann's desire to offer a form of release from The Pit was overwhelmed by the ultimate belief that there is no real escape...........even The Awakening is plagued ominous tones.................no 'Hallelujah!' moment..............Rozmann utilising the digital process to maximum effect in the shifting layers of sound which carry further mutations of the base elements.............finally, The Celebrators...................and absolution of sorts..................relative light at the end of this very long, incredibly dark tunnel..................yet Rozmann will not...cannot resist tingeing this with melancholy..................the celestial voice in the vastness of.........................space?..........the returning, ever returning disruption of peace and stability................before, right at the end, respite.................salvation?
This is without doubt a tremendous achievement..........like life, a test of our ability to persevere..........for what we desire or expect of music is challenged here from the start right until the end........if the techniques and, in part, the results may be familiar to fans of Pierre Henry and Francois Bayle, the sheer scale is like nothing else...............................................it's a long 'river'....................
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