About the album
Tobias Eduard Schick composes subtle, complex, idiosyncratic, and energetic music, seeking out tonal friction, contrasts, and rare nuances of color. His soundscapes seem to be imbued with experiences of reality, like water flowing through different layers of earth before reemerging at the surface in a spring. They originate from mental or physical states, questions of time consciousness, and other aspects of human existence, transforming them into tonal and formal concepts.
A special relationship between delicate, gradually changing soundscapes and unexpected upheavals runs through all five works on this CD like a common thread. Fast, nervously darting movements testify to a suppressed tension, a high, subliminal energy that results not least from the awareness that they can turn into their absolute opposite at any moment. Eruptive piano sounds and short attacks rise like jagged rocks from a sea of imagined sounds, giving little indication of what lies beneath their surface. In returning to places visited in the past, the music appears saturated with the experience of its own history.
Phases of calm and aimless lingering transform and develop a distinct persistence that creates a vacuum, an urge for change that breaks through in sudden upheavals. And even if dark-toned, slowly changing streams of sound and remote, peaceful soundscapes are repeatedly interrupted by violent bursts of sound, this shows that the realms of beauty are not secure, enclosed spaces, but must constantly defend their fragile existence – and that this is perhaps the decisive source of their fascination.