by Dan Warburton

In recent years Malfatti has concentrated increasingly on composition, or rather the interface between composition and improvisation, and has become a leading figure in the ultra-minimal "Berlin school" (though he currently lives in Vienna). He has also worked with fellow Austrian Werner Dafeldecker in the group Polwechsel, whose first album dating from way back in 1993 has become something of a landmark document since its reissue on Hat(Art) a year or so back.
This album, dating from 1997, consists of two Malfatti compositions for, respectively, solo trombone (played by the composer himself) and string quartet. Each piece lasts exactly 2000 seconds - a parallel with the painting inevitably springs to mind: it would seem that Malfatti has chosen this duration in advance, in the same way that a painter selects the canvas before setting to work, therefore having certain given variables regarding the works’ eventual size and scale.

What is remarkable about these two works though has nothing to do with such pre-determined considerations (if indeed pre-determined they are: in the absence of textual clarification on the part of the composer, that is just my assumption based on their particular duration of 33’20"): what is extraordinary is the extreme, minimal austerity of Malfatti’s sound world. Quite simply, even the most delicate late chamber piece by Morton Feldman sounds as opulent as a Mahler symphony in comparison with this: "Die Temperatur der Bedeutung" specifies nothing more than particular methods of blowing into the trombone (at particular angles, or with certain "specified shapes of the mouth cavity"), while "Das Profil des Schweigens" calls for the four string players to bow on pegs, tailpieces and other parts of the body of the instruments, rather than the "normal" contact point on the strings between bridge and fingerboard. (It seems, moreover, that the four instruments were recorded separately on different dates and the recordings superimposed later; I’d be curious to see how Malfatti chose to notate this music, since such recording circumstances would seem to indicate that precise coordination between the performers is not necessarily required.)

At no stage in either composition are there any clearly discernible notes whatsoever, nor any metrical regularity nor rhythm in the accepted sense of the word; there is blowing or bowing ("blasen-klingen" or "streichen-klingen", to quote Antoine Beuger’s well-nigh untranslatable liner notes), interspersed with silence. And that’s it. Or rather that’s just the beginning of what turns out to be a really thrilling sonic adventure: we know now, thanks to John Cage of course, that there is in fact no such thing as silence. In optimum listening conditions (I recommend on headphones in the middle of the night), one is aware here not only of all the tiny sounds that the musicians make in the studio environment which are inevitably captured by ultra-sensitive microphones (breathing, occasional creaks and clicks of chairs, and the ever-present and ultimately acoustically rich audible hiss of the recording itself - these works must have been an absolute nightmare to perform, and especially to record), but also the plethora of sounds that occur outside the confines of the recording - even through good-quality headphones I became increasingly conscious of distant traffic sounds (as heard through closed double-glazing at 5.30am!), the rumbling of water pipes (several floors above my apartment), not to mention the myriad, tiny creasing and rustling sounds of my own hair on the back of the chair I was sitting on, as quietly as I could.
To draw another parallel with the visual arts, one thinks of Duchamp’s "Large Glass", where the viewer cannot see the artist’s distinctive shapes and surfaces without also perceiving the "real" world beyond through the transparent material.