Thing of the Day
Rutman's Steel Cello Ensemble
MAY
17th 2011
Rutman's Steel Cello Ensemble feat. Ginsberg, Hentz & Irmler - s/t (Klangbad)
A
massive coruscating drone, sorry, DRONE... a drone so big it demands
capitalisation. This is what you get when you create a stringed
instrument that appears to be taller than some people's houses. Not
just any old bowed giant sail of steel strung with fishing cables, but
an instrument evolved over decades and decades by a Zen master of
bowing giant steel sails.
Bob Rutman
was blowing giant bubbles of throbbing harmonics with these things when
mere rock n roll was still radical. Rutman is a respected fine artist,
a sculptor and painter and these instruments are as much sculpture as
instruments of music making - in fact the sculptures came first,
created in his Manhattan art gallery (which was called "A Bird Can Fly,
But A Fly Can't Bird) in 1966. It was there that he made the discovery
that they could be brought to life by the bow or by shaking, and began
the long process of creative evolution of the Steel Cello and a
sculpture with bowable steel rods called the Bow Chime. Rutman
founded the US Steel Cello Ensemble in 1975, released several albums
over the years (the original records selling for silly money now). Now
in his 80s, (actually, it's his 80th this week) he's had quite a life,
fleeing Nazi Germany with his mother as a 
child,
escaping via Poland to England and travelling to the States in his
twenties to study art in New York. After growing tired of city
life, he moved to Maine, where he built a house that was said to be as
much a sculpture as a drone, and grew a garden of giant metal
flowers... After years of being the starving pioneer, Rutman returned
to his birthplace of Berlin in the mid 80s, where his work was finally
appreciated.
Now put all that out of your
mind. Here is the DRONE, wordless, mind-blanking and
all-encompassing, rippling with infinite harmonics. It is captured
throughout the eight tracks on this album together with a magnificently
authentic Krautrock rhythmic foundation and deeply empathic sonic
collaborating. This driving, skipping, shuffling drum (Kirsten Ginsberg) joins (Faust veteran) Hans Joachim Irmler alternating on hypnotic guitar, and distorted organ, and the gibberings of Mike Hentz's
Jew's Harp and throat singing, to amplify the intensity of that drone,
to pin down its huge, sky-sized globular form amd give it some
legs. They do so in many different ways, ringing changes and
feeding off the intensity emanating from the Bow Chime and the Steel
Cello.
Many times the rhythmic 'band' part of the Ensemble
back off to give the drone the lead. The final part of of track
two, Sonic, sounds like nothing on earth... unless you've ever 
heard
the uniquely rich propeller throb of a World War II bomber pass over
head. Make that bombers, plural. A deep contradiction: a sinister
and exciting sound that should encapsulate the coldness of deadly
machinery, and the cold purpose behind it, yet warm, alive; and as
endlessly detailed as a living organism. It can also be as soothing and
lulling, a machine surrogate for the white noise of the womb. (Rutman
released an album in the '90s called Music To Sleep By). Like the
chaotic complexities that happen when changing wavelengths join
with and clash with each other, there's a lot of meaning out of the
simple action of a bow drawn across metal... all, in a word, resonance.
