You'll have to forgive me, I'm dipping my toe into unfamiliar territory. This is a CD from four of five years ago, a very pretty CD that I've seen mentioned in despatches, and I've been playing it, and I've been enjoying it. Though there are, at a push, similarities to Feldman (and also Charlemagne Palestine's 'Karenina', though I may be hearing similarities just because I've played that through once or twice this year as well, in a smilar state of mind), it's hard to pin a label on, and to feel you've truly placed it.
A fifty minute piece for delicate instrumentes played softly and hesitantly- the trouble is, lovely though the music may be, and it truly is lovely, it becomes background music. Inexorably and inevitably background music. Background music of the highest order perhaps, but all the same I've played it through perhaps seven or eigh times now since the turn of the year, and I can't say it has engaged me from start to finish even once. Now that's no particular problem- if I'm going to play music while I'm reading, I want it to be something like this, but I'm not sure Klaus Lang set out to write a piece of rarefied ambient music, and damn I feel like I'm letting him down. But there you go.
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In a sense, the ongoing problems I'm having with our neighbours has eased, in that I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel, albeit a light five or six months- at least- down the line. In another sense the problem has deteriorated. We live in a ground floor flat- a comfortable and spacious one, and one that we've turned into a decent family home, but there's no getting around the fact that we have people living above us, and people living above us whose standards and ideas of responibility don't tie in with our own. On one occasion this week they finally hit the sack at 4:15 AM, but there have been a couple of other occasions in the last few days perhaps more relevant in regards to music, and concepts of peace and silence.
We sleep, my wife and I, directly below a bedroom, and below, I'm afraid, a bedroom with no carpeting, just bare floorboards. Ocassional creakines then, only to be expected. Alas, we are being subjected to prolonged periods of walking about on bare floorboards, backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards, for two hours or more at a time. With occasional breaks of perhaps five or six seconds of rest. Odd behaviour, unfathomable behaviour, and a quite dreadful form of torture. But our problems, not yours, imaginary reader, I don't want us to have to dwell on it...
Over the months we've been living here I've tried to develop various strategies for dealing with this though, and one has been the judicious use of the ipod- 'Live in Seattle', black metal, Cecil Taylor at his most energetic. My night-time listening is perhaps not what I would necessrily opt for in an ideal world as I drift off to sleep but, again, there you go.
But 'Einfalt.Stille.'? No. This won't do at all. This music has uses, but it will not block out the noises of inconsiderate humans. A warning, just in case you find yourself in a similar situation.
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