HEINER GOEBBELS “The Mayfield”

ARTIST

Heiner Goebbels

ALBUM TITLE

“The Mayfield”

LABEL

Intakt

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Heiner Goebbels – composer, musician, and director of original music theater – has long pursued a deep correspondence between sound and staging. His music has drawn on jazz, classical, pop, and rock, as well as urban and natural soundscapes; his theater integrates diverse visual cultures and media. The 2018 production Everything That Happened and Would Happen, rehearsed and created in Manchester’s historic (and now disused) Mayfield Depot, was no exception. Featuring twelve dancers and performers in addition to the musicians, it traced a century of European history through an array of stagecraft and a composite soundtrack.

The musicians who contributed to that project became The Mayfield, a group still active today. They recorded no fewer than ninety-five improvisations, from which Willi Bopp – Goebbels’s collaborator for more than thirty years – selected and edited sixteen. These were woven into a lush, fluid continuum: at times dense, at others fragmented, yet always alive. The result provided Goebbels with an opportunity to return to improvisation, a practice he had explored extensively between the mid-1970s and early 1990s in duos with Alfred Harth and with Cassiber, before setting it aside to focus on operas, radio dramas, and large-scale compositions.

The most accurate label for this music might be “improvised electroacoustic,” though even that falls short of capturing its richness: the layering of sounds, the interplay, the collective cohesion, the constant surprises, the energy, and the sense of productive bewilderment it elicits. Each section evolves like a living organism, reshaping its initial state. Percussion – including Goebbels’s prepared piano – bursts in and retreats; saxophones surface unexpectedly; electronic fibrillations run beneath it all; countless interactions unfold. Listening preferences shift with each development, only to be reshaped again by the next.

While Goebbels and Gebbia bring decades of experience and a solid rapport, their younger collaborators prove equally capable, never overwhelmed by the flow of sound generated in the moment. This is a collective to be admired all the more in live performance. After their appearance at AngelicA in 2020, a full Italian tour would be more than welcome.

—Gennaro Fucile

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