The music on this disc ranges from impossible to excruciating. One of the selling points of the contemporary avant-garde is its intellectual obscurity and the way its practitioners challenge the listener–they relish this to the point of pompous vanity, and this disc is an excellent example. The music is dry, distant, and cold, expecting the listener to do all of the work. But what does Furrer give us? There are some interesting moments: the banshee-like screams at the halfway point of Stimmen; the eerie entrance of the baritone soloist in Dort ist das Meer; the startling trumpet that assaults the ear (in a thoroughly effective way) toward the end of Face de la chaleur. These are only moments, though, and not enough to make any of this disc remotely resemble an enjoyable listening experience.
The extensive program notes (paired with some perfectly pretentious free-associative poetry) obfuscate rather than clarify the music. Admittedly, they are translations from German, but they are unwieldy and need yet another translation to even begin to be understood. Examples are too numerous to mention. The playing–that metallic, cool, sometimes-too-brutal and sometimes-too-quiet sound (that sadly seems to be on its way to becoming tradition)–does little to make music out of Furrer’s notes.
