MARMALSANA - REVIEWS
Marmalsana are a Berlin based trio of international origins, with Beirut's Tony Elieh, Cairo's Maurice Louca and Berliner Burkhard Beins. Their music here is performed on acoustic guitar, bass and percussion. And while it's tempting to compare this with some of Louca's other units, the musical blend is truly all its own. The strings display a Middle Eastern attack approach, but their primary language is free improv, with a certain chamber feel and some aggressively deep approaches to percussion. Beautiful stuff.
- Byron Coley, The Wire -
Marmalsana's Seamless yet Dynamic Collisions
Percussionist Burkhard Beins remains an early and crucial pillar of Berlin's Echtzeitmusik scene, transforming his instrumental array into a fount of sustained texture and color, largely dispensing with any conventional notion of rhythm. Over time he's remained committed to that sonic ethos even as many subsequent practitioners have turned the approach into a creative cul-de-sac that's turned quietude and space into cliches. The music Beins makes, of course, conveys a much richer world of possibilities, displaying a ready elasticity and engagement with other aesthetic tendencies. One of the most fascinating partnerships he's forged in recent years is with the two expat Arab musicians he collaborates with in the trio Marmalsana, which belatedly celebrates the release of its excellent eponymous debut album with a performance on Wednesday, September 18 at the Panda Theater.
This all-acoustic trio also includes the Lebanese bassist Tony Elieh and Egyptian guitarist Maurice Louca, both of whom line up with and push against the percussionist's reduced sound world. The album begins with a kind of static churn that one might expect from Beins, who generates a shimmery rumble in partnership with Elieh's roiling, single note thrum, subtly spiked by a distant pulse: something moving suggests stillness. Suddenly, three minutes in, Louca begins playing his quarter-tone guitar, unleashing a forceful series of lean arpeggios littered with rhythmic asides that opens everything up, expanding both the palette but also prodding his partners to increase the tension and heft of their roiling foundation. The section concludes with a sudden bell tone from the percussionist, halting the thrum and opening up a delicate dialogue between Louca and himself, the latter deliveing a sparse tangle of soft metallic pings and rustles. The two sections are at once masterfully connected and deliciously disparate, setting up a session of constantly morphing contrasts that I've found hard to resist.
Beins is very much recognizable throughout, particularly through his penchant for friction-driven sound, which often positions Elieh as a kind of free agent, navigating the divide between texture and melody. On the section titled "Forvelu," Louca's plucked patterns evoke the sound of an oud—brittle, twangy, and crisply microtonal; gestures answered by piercing bowed cymbals from Beins. Elieh toggles between muted, picked tones and bowed strings, that is until about halfway through when the energy suddenly swells, with flamenco-like accents on guitar and bass and wonderfully explosive, teetering beats from Beins, before it dissolves into silence. The following section "Esplorado" is an exercise in pointillism, as a constellation of terse sonic dabs engage in a nimble three-way dance, with little squeaks, brief overtones, and shudders peppering the sonic expanse, before it unfolds into a purely percussive downpour of splattery sound. It's a wonderful album that suggests how those reduced materials can be shepherded into something truly dynamic and exciting, all of it fueled by an obvious rapport and shared vision. Louca and Elieh work together in multiple projects, including the great Arabic rock band Karkhana, while Beins and the bassist also have a duo called Zone Null, so the overlapping interests are nothing new. Still, intersecting ideas don't ever guarantee something this cohesive and absorbing.
- Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street -
Marmalsana have deep experimental and improvised roots. German percussionist Burkhard Beins was a founder of the Echtzeitmusik (real-time music) movement in Berlin, an influential, genre-fluid community which sprouted up around squats in the east of the city in the 1990s and understood free-improvisation as composition in real time. Egypt-born, now Berlin-based Maurice Louca, here playing quarter tone acoustic guitar, was part of The Dwarfs Of East Agouza with Alan Bishop and Sam Shalabi. Tony Elieh was a founder of Lebanese post-rockers Scrambled Eggs, and has since moved into detailed explorations of the electric bass' unique sonorousness. For this self-titled debut, the trio play completely acoustically with no amplification. The tracks are plucked, rattled and thrummed exercises in nuanced rhythmic and textural exploration. The juxtapositions and tensions between melodic and non-idiomatic are entrancing, peaking on 'Alveno', when Louca plays out a jaunty, almost folky melody on the quarter tone guitar which the other two make a throbbing, creaking soundscape around. The whole album arcs like a storm rising and falling, with all the shifting pressure and unpredictable eddies of movement and sound that suggests.
- Daryl Worthington, The Quietus -
Burkhard Beins, Maurice Louca (bekannt durch Dwarfs of East Agouza, Elephantine, Karkhana und Lekhfa) aus Kairo und Tony Elieh (von Karkhana, Calamita, Wormholes Electric) aus Beirut bilden in Berlin Marmalsana, er mit Percussion und sie, jeweils akustisch, mit Viertelton- und Bassgitarre. Damit weben sie, grummelnd, schrammelnd, mit glockenspielerischem Kling- und Glöckchenklang, träumerisch gezupften und bekrabbelten Saiten, geschabtem Fell und Metall, knisterndem Feinklang, sirrendem, bebendem Bowing, rumorendem Pauken, ostinatem Riffen, crashenden Akzenten Klang-Teppiche, die, wenn nicht den Arsch, so doch die Phantasie himmelweit davontragen können. Plinkplonkende, quiekende, pi(c)kante, klickernde, rau scharrende, flirrende, händisch tappenden Laute suchen auf Marmalsana zwischen 'Forvelu' (Abfahrt) und 'Alveno' (Ankunft) Übergänge (Transiroj) über 'Inundo' (Überschwemmung) und andere 'Sekvoj' (Konsequenzen) des kapitalo- und fossilozänen Irrsinns. Eiernde Klangschalen, surrende Vibration, leises Wummern, monotones Drahtharfen... - liebäugelt Berliner Echtzeit da mit Folklore imaginaire?
- Rigobert Dittmann, Bad Alchemy -
The trio's first collaborative project is purely instrumental and polyrhythmic with Middle Eastern influences, without restoring to amplification. German composer Burkhard Beins unites with Lebanon's post-rock pioneer Tony Elieh and Egyptian musician Maurice Louca on an experimental jazz project titled 'Marmalsana'.
Marking their first collaboration, 'Marmalsana' is divided into two extended parts, and sees the trio relying solely on acoustic instruments, employing extended techniques to produce drone-like sound textures and polyrhythms without restoring to amplification. It is a distinct experimental effort on classic jazz improvisation. Iridescently moving between distinct placements of sound and moments beyond instrumental recognisability, the album is dominated by a classic synth melody fused with avant-garde jazz elements and Middle Eastern influences.
The guitar riffs on part one sound very much like classic oud arrangements, accompanied by a cacophony of sonic textures, from twinkling bells to clusters of seemingly industrial sounds and glitches with emotional violin brewing underneath the surface of its outro. In part two, a cluster of scraping noises and metallic clinging trickle into your ears like a rather accelerated yet somehow muted sound of ants marching over the mush of your brain. While it can be unnerving once you hear it, the track’s dulcet and lilting sonic patterns are somewhat calming.
The project reflects the trio’s multicultural backgrounds, diverse styles and influences, forming some kind of a nomadic musical language between Cairo, Beirut and Berlin. Though it's purely instrumental with no lyrics whatsoever, it is fresh, new, emotional and all too self-expressive.
- Scene Noise -