Christian Winther Christensen
Almost in G

About the Rearrangement of our Ears
By Peter Meanwell

In Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt, written when the author was on the run in the south of France during WW2, our eponymous narrator gives a detailed, yet rigorous account of his employer Mr Knott’s domestic peculiarities. Each day Mr Knott would rearrange the “solid and tasteful” furniture in his room – his dressing-table would be in a different place on Tuesday than it was on Monday. His night-stool and wash-hand stand and tallboy would all move around on a daily basis too.

Solid and with taste, yet subjected to frequent changes of position – this Beckett- like mantra runs through my head as I reconstruct my notes from that first listen to Christian Winther Christensen’s new record. Sitting in a rather unspectacular Berlin park on an unseasonably warm late autumn afternoon I was plunged in to a world of detail, of precision, of sonic expression that feels warm and familiar, yet fundamentally altered. Here within Christian’s world, one which is unassuming, not shouting too loud to be noticed, the solid and tasteful have been rearranged to construct something entirely new.

These are instruments that we recognise, of course. Like Mr Knott’s dressing table and night stool, there is a piano, yes, and a guitar. There is a flute and a clarinet. But like a bag of chocolates left in a pocket they have melted down and re-solidified in to a new form. Timbres recombined to birth a mechanical beast that clumps like an organic being. Metal on metal, the multitudinous quality of strings, the slapping, the twanging, the micro-ricochets, the hammering. The piano, through its preparations, is no longer orchestra but joyous percussion again. The flute is no longer Syrinx, that nymph transformed, but breath expended, released, not as a sigh, but a tyre being let down, and re-pumped. Distinguishing between instrumental voices is no longer a concern. This is a one-(wo)man band, each instrument organically bonded to the other. Not bigger than the sum of its parts but made bigger because each part is crafted with consummate care and attention.

If the Futurists made music that incorporated and reflected the noise of the city, this is music that embraces the sounds of (mundane) labour. Of wiping and sanding, and pumping and polishing, of collapsing and reconstructing. It has the air of something flat packed being assembled and rebuilt, each time a little different, each time with a flaw in a different place. This is not a derogatory comparison, for within this music is an obsession with the detail of being human. The peculiarities that make us unique, the infirmities that construct character. It is the embrace of the everyday in this sound world that distinguishes the enterprise. It is a mundane futurism, that revels in the rearrangement of our sonic reality.

Sitting in this Berlin park, I watch children whizz around a track unstable on their tiny bicycles. The insecure wobbles of their new found mobility underlying their perpetual forward motion. There is nothing insecure about this record, but there is an active embrace of the wobble. [...]