5AM by Ute Kanngiesser & Daniel Kordík

TO LISTEN, SUPPORT & READ:
www.cafeoto.co.uk/shop/ute-kanngiesser-daniel-kordik-5am/

Released by Cafe OTO's TAKUROKU

"At 4AM I slip out of the house to cycle east, towards dawn, with cello on my back and a stool strapped to the rack. The word 'essential' is turning over and around in my head. I am taking the quietest roads, trying to stay invisible, worried that someone might stop me and interfere with our plans. I find Daniel with recording equipment and hand sanitizer and together we walk another distance through dawn and smell of rain. We enter the Marshes, these essential lungs of East London. It is where he had come almost every day of these locked-down weeks to field-record and breathe. And it is where Evie and I met for walks and secret music - carefully bending the laws of the officially ‘essential’. I am wondering about places and times when public music was forbidden and never driven to extinction. This time it is for pandemic reasons and the severity of consequences is unspeakable and has turned into much noise in my head. But the birds, the wind, and the rain offer such relief and I feel so shy in their presence that my music can only become the smallest of offerings to them in the rainless window between 4.48AM and 5.15AM." - (Ute Kanngiesser, June 2020)


REVIEWS:

http://www.cookylamoo.com/boringlikeadrill/2020/08/senses-of-place-takuroku.html

There’s a stark contract of place and time in Ute Kanngiesser and Daniel Kordík’s 5AM, recorded early one June morning not far from here, where I’ve been sitting for the past five months. I’m well aware it’s summer now, but everything I’ve been hearing this year suggests a perpetual British spring, slow and belated. Kordík’s recording of Kanngiesser playing cello on the Hackney Marshes began at 4:48 AM and it instantly reminds me that it was the right time of year to coincide with the dawn chorus. The piece is, in fact, a recording of birdsong gently accompanied by Kanngiesser adding faint sounds, usually harmonics. As an artistic statement, it’s simply an act of joining in with the surroundings, yet that simple act was both liberating and transgressive. Reading Kanngiesser’s notes reminds you of the evasive action needed to record this piece, at a time when “essential” travel was restricted. It seems later than I remembered, yet also so much longer ago than I thought. This release comes with writing by Evie Ward and is available in WAV format, as recommended by the musicians.

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Michael Quinn, https://thesampler.org/news-opinion/takuroku-5am-review/

Michael Quinn reviews 5AM by Ute Kanngiesser & Daniel Kordík (with writing by Evie Ward), released under Takuroku — Cafe Oto’s digital label supporting artists in lockdown.

Cocooned within a moment of suspended but simultaneously elasticated time, Ute Kanngiesser and Daniel Kordík’s 5AM is also a retreat into the empty, liminal spaces of early hours. A deeply personal response to lockdown, it finds the cellist seeking solace in the relative wildness of London’s Walthamstow Marshes and succour in the sound of the dawn chorus.

Kanngiesser’s secret tryst with nature takes root in the liquid transition from day to night, from quiet and stillness to the bright, animated cacophony of a multi-voiced avian choir. Vital and immediate as Daniel Kordík’s field recording is, it’s Kanngiesser’s tentative negotiating of it, her attempts to insinuate the darker, bass-baritonal timbre of her cello into and though the soprano-high sonic gauze of multiple bird songs that makes for rewarding eavesdropping.

She’s not the first to attempt a musical conversation with nature, though what’s here is more considered, less serendipitous than the nightingales that famously accompanied Beatrice Harrison’s Elgar recital in her Surrey garden – a pioneering outside broadcast by the BBC in 1924 that produced unintended but felicitous results. Kanngiesser adroitly inverts that relationship, maintaining a discrete distance, only tentatively attempting to insinuate herself into a dialogue with her feathered vocalists.

Kept low in the mix, Kanngiesser’s cello increasingly mimics the enveloping birdsong as other ambient sounds begin to cut through. We’re far from Messiaen’s obsessive translating of birdsong into music here where the emphasis is on allying the artificial voice of the cello with the natural, organic soundtrack surrounding it rather than simply appropriating it. The conceit provides Kanngiesser with ample room for subtlety and occasional spikes of quizitive commentary.

There’s a taut, controlled quality to her lightly-worn array of techniques where various bowing and fingering choices accent emotional spaces beyond the merely descriptive, striving to re-connect to a world made newly remote by the prohibitions of movement during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Part meditation on, part mediation of the natural world as a place of refuge in troubled times, 5AM also queries what and how music can function and contribute to profoundly changed circumstances. If it has any meaningful analogue, it can claim some kinship to a morning rāga, something to escape within to explore the daily ritual of the world itself awakening from slumber.

Music by Ute Kanngiesser & Daniel Kordík. Writing by Evie Ward.Artwork design by Oli Barrett.

My music spans across three main domains: electronic music, free improvisations and field recordings. This page lists almost all my solo albums, regular and one of collaborations.