Marcus Schmickler with Hayden Chisholm - "Amazing Daze"

Marcus Schmickler with Hayden Chisholm - Amazing Daze (For Phill Niblock) (Hapna 2007)

Marcus Schmickler with Hayden Chisholm - Amazing Daze / Hapna

It wasn't so much the names that grabbed hold of me. Pluramon, Mimeo and Wabi Sabi don't mean a great deal to me personally, but my knowledge of mid-90s Cologne is limited to be fair. Likewise, New Zealander Hayden Chisholm hadn't set off any bells one way or another. Going into Amazing Daze, all I had was the curious album artwork and two tracks with elongated titles to go by. It turns out that Amazing Daze is so much more than that: It's a concert, it's a meditation, it's an epiphany, it's a collaboration of two minds that bears beautiful drone fruit.

To understand Amazing Daze (and the song which has been posted here), it's best to understand who these men are. First, Schmickler: As a university student in Cologne studying music under Messrs Fritsch and Humpert, Schmickler developed a talent for ambient texturalization. This has translated into a number of pseudonyms that litter the past decade. His impressive back catalog fills up a good size of A-Musik's releases but as seen here he isn't strictly tied to them.

Chisholm is another story. Just from his website, I get the feeling that this is the kind of guy I want to hang out with. Posts are full of things like, "I managed to break the Guiness [sic] Record for the longest tone on a clarinet by holding one for 50 minutes in the middle of this football stadium in Austria," and "The fact that the German government flew me back to my homeland to give this talk raised many a kiwi eyebrow." From Mallorca to LAX to Kenya, Chisholm has been around the world and back again. The benefit for us are not just the half- or untold stories, but his sponge-like ability to sop up the musical cultures he inhabits.

Notably, Chisholm seems to frequent Germany often and he no doubt hooked up with Schmickler through their work in Pluramon... But Germany has very little to do with this release, split between "Amazing Daze (For Phill Niblock)" and "Infinity in the Shape of a Poodle (for Björk Gudmundsdottir)," which if nothing else goes to show you why Björk sticks with her first name. In fact, it doesn't really have to do with Iceland either: The title piece is a slow-burning bagpipe piece that Niblock himself would've been proud of as its microtones change courses and slither back into position over 23 minutes. There's a stretch little over halfway through that foreshadows the following track, but by the time the last breath of air leaves the bagpipe, it's back to where we started.

The Björk track revolves almost entirely around high-end manipulation of the sho, a Japanese free reed instrument constructed around 17 bamboo pipes. In a most unflattering description, listening to the sho is like listening to held-down horns at a stoplight in a higher octave. Here Schmickler and Chisholm use this headache of an instrument to their advantage by twisting and writhing around in a high pitch that only breaks pace around 18 minutes when it slowly fades out. At first it sounds angelic, but the longer you live with it, the longer you see the sho as an enemy than a friend. Images of a Rapture from which there is no escape are conjured and you think your head is about to blow when, suddenly, 20 minutes into the piece, it dies. Just like that, fading away to nothing.

Maybe it seems a little too academic, but I enjoyed Amazing Daze as I would enjoy a piece by Eno or Begushkin or Espers. It's the stretching out, the building up, the breaking down, and the manipulating within that makes these two songs so good. It's also what makes these two composers so interesting to watch. At the moment, they're on form as they've never been before. Amazing Daze is just the latest reason why.