Irmin Schmidt - 5 Klavierstücke (Mute)

Can founder Irmin Schmidt’s pieces for piano are in search of lost memory and misplaced time, finding tranquility regained alongside the menace of things to come

Irmin Schmidt’s five pieces for piano move through corridors of memory, corridors of time. There’s a sense of channelled restlessness, a searching quality of specificity. It feels akin to Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad – abstraction grounded in the very human need to misremember how things really were.

Each of the five numbered pieces exists on the edge of something. Schmidt doesn’t wish to rattle the door in a futile gesture of trying to get inside. He works on the internal mechanics of the lock instead, attempting to bypass the need for a key. There is often an urgency to the search. “At other places,” states Last Year at Marienbad screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet in his novel Jealousy, “something seems about to end; everything indicates this: a gradual cadence, tranquility regained, the feeling that nothing remains to be said”. The sense of tranquility regained permeates 5 Klavierstücke, although it may be that time has come unstuck, as there’s a concurrent menace of things to come.

Externalised memory and internalised time manifest as the haunted personal pasts of the hotel and grounds of Last Year at Marienbad. But also as the ersatz New York streets and unstable desires of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. There’s Kubrickian menace in Schmidt’s corners of quietude. Conspiracy theories encroach upon memory, threatening to sideline enlightenment with distracting narratives. A door creaks (open?) at the end of “Klavierstücke IV”; found sounds and lost memories seep out onto endlessly expanding and contracting corridors of time.