drank (Ingrid Schmoliner & Alexander Kranabetter) – Breath in Definition

On ‘Min’, the second track from Ingrid Schmoliner and Alexander Kranabetter’s debut album as drank, an arpeggiated piano loop takes us on a sinuous and disorientating rollercoaster ride amid the screws and sputtering, the drills and hammering of Schmoliner’s prepared piano while Kranabetter’s trumpet trills and splutters and whistles in spurts over the top. Those piano preparations add a rackety percussive clangour to the track and when the trumpet manages to fulfil a more sustained tone it is imbued with great depth of feeling, defiant and yearning like a stifled wail or muffled bugle call. There’s all sorts of electronic processing going on here in addition to the piano alterations, but the result however mutated or striated is absolutely exhilarating, a cacophony of the spirit.

Schmoliner and Kranabetter are described as pillars of the improvised scene in their native Austria, with the pianist and pedagogue Schmoliner – who uses her meticulous piano preparations to generate vibrant psychoacoustic and spatialised effects, no doubt influenced by her educational background in yodelling and overtone singing – collaborating with Pascal Niggenkemper and Joachim Badenhorst as Watussi and the hornist Elena Kakaliagou as Nabelóse while the double album Awon Ona gathered together the best of a series of festival performances with the legendary percussionist Hamid Drake. Meanwhile the introspective trumpeter Kranabetter deploys bristling electronics to expand the possibilities of his instrument and has been part of the jazz quartet Month of Sundays and the sextet Gnigler while working on projects alongside the likes of Voodoo Jürgens, Fuzzman, Zinn, Tumido, Kevin Shea and Matt Mottel.

Breath in Definition marks their debut studio album as drank, a duo which they established after performing together with Franz Hautzinger in August of 2021 at the V:NM Festival in Graz. With a sense of the texture of a given piece based on their selection of electronic effects and piano preparations, the duo took an improvisational approach to composition, recording everything before honing in on certain passages and features which they then built out through a series of live performances and subsequent studio sessions. As many as ten pieces or fragments were composed in this manner, with the four selected for Breath in Definition recorded with Markus Wallner at Westbahnstudios in Vienna before they returned to Martin Siewert who mastered the project.

The album opener ‘Iridescent’ is developed through quavering sine tones and the rich sound of Kranabetter’s trumpet, soaring and searching, aching and a little bit world weary yet still determined and proud, with a bit of fur and distortion yet the resounding expressive clarity of something like the folk themes from Sketches of Spain. As a clatter of triangle-like percussion gathers pace towards the end of the piece, with the sense of something which is about to shatter, the trumpet gets thicker and more distorted so that it sounds like the duo massing their forces in stately and solemn fashion for the record to come.

And on ‘Gitta’ the foundational loop is more of a hump or a gas, like an air valve or piston in the depths of some massive and faceless industrial facility which sticks cheerily to its task amid the more furtive wheezes of the surrounding plant. Kranabetter’s trumpet issues plaintive sighs over the top of all this chicanery, with his brass and Schmoliner’s piano joined momentarily by Lukas Koenig on marimba and effects.

A versatile and prolific percussionist whose recent work has included Spam Likely with Jessica Pavone and Mottel, Plehak with the Synesthetic Quartet and his own For Anton (Works for Marimba, Amplified Cymbal & Synthesizers) which was dedicated to his grandfather who bought him a marimbaphone back in 2004, here Koenig takes all of the resonance and bounce out of the idiophone, reducing its output to a scampering rattle which moves at a brisk pace even where it sounds brittle or dried out. But the combination of those scampering wooden bars, a few coarser industrial puffs and grunts, some buried piano glissandos and the oscillating menace of the trumpet seems to pull us out of the facility or collectively watches on as it simply melts away, making for a more spectral and lurching second half of the composition. At times the marimba and Schmoliner’s piano manipulations even sound like gamelan percussion as the ephemeral trio hack away through vines and reeds.

All of this clamour or textural abundance makes the album closer a stark contrast. On the title track ‘Breath in Definition’ slender chimes introduce Anja Plaschg’s smoky spoken word vocal with the trumpet steadily emerging to wail and stammer in the skies overhead.

The eerie and domineering, Nico-esque voice of the Soap&Skin singer sounds lean and ravenous as she opens with the lines ‘Fish in the sand, oil in veins, puppets writhing. Eyes open and mouth blown on the gallows, from abrasions placed at sea’ continuing in this surreal or stream of consciousness fashion to wonder ‘can you tell me about hell?’ before summoning up the title vision through ‘Intuition from the sand. I wanna eat, I wanna eat, I wanna eat you, and I blur you with a breath in definition’. The chafing of Kranabetter’s trumpet and the plangency of Schmoliner’s chimes imbue the pregnant pauses of Plaschg’s poetry with a ripe and hypnotising portent.