Chain D.L.K.
"A Linear Thought" - TM, Dalia Donadio, Berni Doessegger
2018

Related somehow to the previous review (the one on Cold Voodoo), as for the presence of hyperactive musician and composer Tobias Meier, this release sees Tobias in the guise of composer or I'd rather say a voice director for a very unconventional project. The only performer on A Linear Thought is the vocalist Dalia Donadio, based on the explanatory words (in German) by Berni Doessegger. I said the role played by Tobias is more close to the one of a single-input orchestral director, as he seems to define the performative strategies for Dalia's vocals, each for one of the five parts of this composition, supercompressed in two short tracks (lasting 3 minutes and 20 seconds only). The most interesting aspect of this release (requiring two years to be completed, as it was reprised many times over this pretty long timeframe) is that is nothing but a sort of "act of awareness" on perception (in a certain sense, it could be considered as a sort of extension behind the surrounding concept of Wide Ear Records as well) and the importance and the uniqueness of human voice (as "an instrument common to all people" and as a primary "personal organ for communication and emotions"). Such a reflection got well explained by Berni's words and well translated into voice by Dalia for the fans of unconventional notations for music scores. Some sketches of Berni's words will render an idea of what I tried to describe: "...lungs, glottis, vocal cords, throat, tongue, lips. From the body's interior to the exterior and back into a hearing ear. This alone already explains the binding and touching power of the voice, its inner intimacy, its immense transference" - the text related to the first part. And again on the fourth part: "sound is the stretching of time. It folds time, in order to give time to time itself (this is what the ear does with sound). If temporality is the dimension of the act of sounding, this is because sounding defines itself as that which separates itself from there, from the other, from itself, so as to oscillate, to become itself and to become something else. Therefore, the voice, its inner and outer expansion, is an echo chamber, a body of time and space, a resonance that it places inside itself".

Vito Camarretta
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