VA - Tobias Eduard Schick: Turns and Tensions (2024) [Hi-Res]

Tobias Eduard Schick composes subtle, complex, idiosyncratic and energetic music, seeks tonal friction, contrasts and rare color nuances. His sound worlds seem to be permeated by experiences of reality like water that flows through different layers of the earth before coming back to the surface in a spring. They start from mental or physical states, questions of time consciousness and other aspects of the human condition and transform these into sound and formal concepts.

A special relationship of delicate, gradually changing soundscapes and unexpected upheavals runs through all five works on this CD like a common thread. Fast, nervously scurrying movements testify to a suppressed tension, to a high, subliminal energy, which results not least from the awareness that they can turn into their absolute opposite at any time. Eruptive piano sounds and short attacks rise like jagged rocks from a sea of ​​imagined sounds, giving little idea of ​​what lies beneath their surface. Returning to places previously visited, the music appears saturated with the experience of its own history.

Phases of calm and unintentional lingering change and develop a pronounced persistence that creates a vacuum, an urge for change that breaks out in sudden upheavals. And even if violent masses of sound break in with all their force again and again into dark-toned, slowly changing sound streams and remote, peaceful sound landscapes, it becomes clear that the areas of beauty are not secure, enclosed spaces, but that they continually reassert their fragile existence have to defend themselves - and that this is perhaps the decisive source of their fascination.