Un Être Humain Ordinaire
The album cover of Ümlaut’s “Un être humain ordinaire” (an ordinary human being) suggests a sense of being on the edge. But on the edge of what? Each track title offers a clue as to the methodology of Düngfelder’s aesthetic intentions. Precise and focused, there are no accidents here. A pathway to a very personal world has been created—a world replete with intentional and conceptual connections. Randomness and selection define the edges of digital manipulation, atmospherics and textures. Distant synths and field recordings echo, transform and expand. Intricate details enter the headspace while sounds sketch a new landscape. As in poetics the variation of microstructures and artistic vision are both beautiful and isolated. Through deliberate and detailed production, the album calls forth a defined sense of place. Intentionally random sonic exploration has always been about transforming pure chance into something decidedly different. Without sound there can be no silence.
Recorded in Connecticut 2023
Music composed & constructed by Jeff Düngfelder
Mixed & Mastered at the Hopmeadow Studio, Weatogue, Connecticut
Design by Jeff Düngfelder
Tracklisting:
- Forgetting To Remember
- La Mer Gelée
- Until We Became Nothing
- Poeme
- What Comes Floating To The Surface
- Ordinary Light, Under Things
- Artifacts As Media
- Pour Un Moment
- Puncturing Space
- Everything Is Appearing On Its Own
- Damage Control
- Un Être Humain Ordinaire
Ümlaut
Ümlaut is Jeff Düngfelder, a U.S. experimental composer/sound artist now based in the northern Connecticut countryside. The thematic concepts distinguishing his work are absence and silence; the ineffable exchange between viewer and image; random moments of stillness within a landscape in flux. Using a minimalistic, electro-acoustic approach, his elusive patchwork of field recordings and electronics merge with the world of shadows and colours. Allowing for infinite possible interpretations, he lets the listener’s imagination fill in the blanks between the grainy textural sounds with elements of ambient, musique concrète and noise. Combining spaciousness with a sense of intimacy introduces a musical language of experimental ambience. His memory recordings expose the complex relationship between music and silence.
Reviews
Santa Sagre
Peering into these works lets out a reflective and unexpected plethora, shaping out versions -visitations?- which shifts each odd tone fluently. By the use of sampling his compositions has the effect of multiple responses, questioning where we’ve been for all these years.
A showcase only contains what it can hold unless you’re listening to ‘Un Être Humain Ordinaire’.
Such an animated story has gotten out; the creator’s mind cannot hold these revolving strands in order. Releasing such dreams only opens up a concept with each passing moment, streaming onwards… circling back track by track. This foreshadowing is far from a dank or dull interpretation from Ümlaut; investigating a collaged musician’s delight. I’ve been inundated by so many artful passages, merging Into a scenery. Or is it a tapestry?
Spiraling such thoughts becomes a slippery theory, “Artifacts As Media” or ‘Punching Space” evaporate splendidly; as we’re approaching the closing bells “Damage Control” isn’t controlled it is a suggestion, staying just out of reach. “Everything is Appearing on its Own” frames those questions bravely.
Nowhere will you fine any trace of pride, arrogance or a vindictive hostility here; standing in the midst where the sea freezes ‘An Ordinary Human Being’ is in its own dimension. Each gate on that ice is erased by a character which on this outing is both perceptible and tangible.
Original review > HERE
Musique Machine
There are some ambient, abstract works of electronic music that are so hermetic – claustrophobic, even – that the worlds they created leave little room for an outside even as their source material depends on it. This is neither good nor bad; it is simply a way of categorizing certain albums as they appear in a landscape populated by a host of other endeavors, be they groups, performances, or listener-driven works. Ümlaut (aka Jeff Düngfelder) is unapologetically hermetic, and his latest release, Un Étre Humain Ordinaire, is a tribute to the expansive and yet cloyingly interiorized space of ambient production. Nestled in the outer reaches of rural Connecticut, Ümlaut pieced 12 compositions for this release, totaling over an hour, in which the idea of capture – both literally in the recording process and as an arrested individual – is visited over and over again, like an ethnographer's sketchbook of the self.
There are few rhythmic elements on Un Étre Humain Ordinaire, which causes the whole album to drift, moving between sound sources and devices without predetermined structure or pattern. The effect on "Everything Is Appearing On Its Own," is creepy, as if the self-referential crux of the track might gesture to something beyond the composer himself, like a ghost or spirit. It is often cold and a bit creepy, this mood, with field recordings providing the echoed traces of absent footsteps or movements through undefined spaces. One technique, evidenced on "Artifacts as Media," is to push one sonic language against another, where these leftover pieces (artifacts) are layered not just for aesthetic but also methodological interest.
Un Étre Humain Ordinaire should appeal to those who are drawn to ambient works with a meandering, often hermetic character, as well as others who delight in the more conceptual, self-referential composers of abstract electroacoustic music.
Original review > HERE