The composer and pianist Ingrid Schmoliner writes and plays music the allure of which cannot be resisted. Her pieces are ecstatic cascades of sound which unite formal strictness and psychoactive effects. Schmoliner plays them with absolute precision. Her perfect technique allows her to create dramatic arcs with subtle variations. This creates hunting rides through tunnels of sound, whose sonic characteristics due to a carefully prepared piano remind one of Gamelan music. Sometimes percussive and noisy, and in the next moment clear and open with shimmering overtones. Schmoliners music is compelling and at the same time aethereal and fleeting. It sounds like soulful mechanics, sprawling organically into boundlessness. Its essence is the process.
Schmoliners piano work MNEEM is a breathtaking one hour plus tour de force through complex uptempo pattern, played on the prepared grand piano. A unique musical experience that unfolds its magic instantly after a few minutes. For the player MNEEM is a very exhausting piece; it demands full concentration and technical skills of the highest level. For the audience it is a euphoric trancelike journey of 62 minutes that will leave the listeners thunderstruck.
Ingrid Schmoliner’s new organ composition I Am Animal (released by Idyllic Noise in Nov.24) is both fragile and overwhelming. This work is large, vast and profound. It allows the church organ to live and breathe like an independent being. I Am Animal is hard to believe with all its massive presence and simultaneous fragility. The piece was premiered in a Tyrolean parish church as part of the artacts ’24 festival. Open chords that don’t resolve for what feels like an eternity revolve around a voluminous bass. The simultaneity of high and low frequencies creates beats that give the piece a subliminal rhythm. Sawing intervals testify to the composer’s uncompromising nature. The subtle beauty of this music lies in its patina, in the scratching, rustling and hissing of the church organ.