The great Frans de Waard is Holland‘s finest, here performing under one of his many guises, and has been associated with deep and droney instrumental projects for a long time. This is his third CD as Freiband. Here, you must devote your time to carefuly exploring ten tracks f quite and slow and exquisite music, which de Waard has realised in his usual craftsmanlike manner. Raw sound material was generated by his daughter Elise de Waard, who played “a wide variety of musical and non-musical objects†while Frans recorded everything with contact microphones. She was three years old at the time; the objects were those which de Waard elser uses to make Kapotte Muziek, and include sheets of metal, paper, sticks, plastic and junk. Resultant soundfiles were presumably loaded into a handy laptop, then reprocessed in line with his usual alchemical methods; he first did it in 2003 while staying in Boston USA and had sufficient material to play a concert there. Subsequent additions and extensions were made, allowing him to play further concerts at many venues in Holland, including VPRO radio in Amsterdam. While de Waard‘s own descriptions of this process — clearly very important to him — are delivered in short matter-of-fact statements on the back cover, the artwork to Leise (drawn by Rui Vitorino Santos) gives us a more imaginative view of the process. A happy little girl cuddles five cats in her hand, while her hair (rendered à la Scottie Wilson) grows Rapunzel-like in all directions, terminating in a laptop computer. Along the way these wild strands embrace other animals, drown a grand piano in an ocean of hair, and loop through the windows of a huge castle in their hirsute odyssey. This visual fantasy has more brio than the rather subdues and minimalistic process-based sounds that emanate from the actual record, but I think as with most of de Waard‘s work you really have to take the time, listen carefully, and let every moment of it seep into your bones.
Ed Pinsent