http://sylviahinz.bandcamp.com/album/windserie
There is something about the flute that’s epically binding. I can’t be sure if this statement is a result of cultural impressions and a recent rereading of Beowulf, or a more exacting muscular resonance that supplies a unique historic claim upon studied listening. I was entranced by this categorical uncertainty while plumbing this musical space. An evil presence is here, but it’s rendered soft. The fat of a wild boar pounded to shape. We ascribe a name to the butcher and give him a memory. The flute is a catalyst and very emotional. Hinz’s “Windserie” is full of sweeping gestures, snatched from our grasp at the moment they’re proclaimed. Imploring melismas that are not so much happy or sad as they are brave.
I think this particular epic narrative is a stab at neo-folklore. She tells a tale of scientific focus groups engaged in radical breath tests that call into question collective breathing, rate and strength of aspiration recorded in a room, shitty cookies and all for the taking, checked boxes that dictate if you snore.
There is the solitary scientist with a flute, and Hinz’s flute is a thorough analysis of his body up and down to the last detail; pearl buttons of the raincoat, worn hands that have raised children and typed on a lot of keyboards. Her flute playing is extreme, a meditation on maximized focus, memorialized in scientific tribes that once walked this earth and now are only weather, specific days with a specific cloud coverage. This album takes polymorphic shape as it recounts scenarios where one historically connects, historical existence must be accepted, despite the fractured bath of search engines and Macs, and the subsequent fact that we probably don’t want to accept it.
Are human beings no longer capable of captivation? Perhaps this is the bigger point these windsongs crave to teach us. The mouth opens and there is no choice but to gape at the aperture. You leave the flutist’s installation piece (which is wind, on a peak) knowing that somewhere in your flesh the unresolvable grows. We don’t know where we came from anymore.
thesupercoda 