Mode Records has released on the edges, a disc of works by the German composer-cellist Gerald Eckert, born 1960. It comes courtesy of Ensemble Reflexion K, which is based, improbably, in the Baltic Sea resort of Eckernförde, in Schleswig-Holstein a little south of the Danish border. Eckert studied with Brian Ferneyhough and Jonathan Harvey, among others; his language of gradually billowing and dematerializing sounds is closer to the latter than the former, and, in its attention to the sonic complexity of sustained tones, also brings to mind Giacinto Scelsi. The three works on the program — An den Rändern des Maßes, Bruchstücke ... erstarrtes Lot, and Sopra di noi... (niente) — periodically erupt into dense, seething masses of instrumental sound, yet the dominant atmosphere is contemplative, as if chaotic natural processes were being observed telescopically across vast distances. A program note by Jörg Meyer asserts that Eckert is concerned with the "concept of nothingness in its transcendental abundance"; the music bears out this flamboyant claim. Above is Eckert's Feld 3, from another Reflexion K disc, on Neos.
