01/17/2026
ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2025 on 5:4!
GERALD ECKERT:
night, falling
"This is, very simply, among the most dazzling and exciting music – acoustic, electronic, electroacoustic, whatever – you’re ever likely to encounter."
GERALD ECKERT: night, falling
mode 347 (2-CDs) $29.98
https://moderecords.com/catalog/347eckert/
or Bandcamp (also download):
https://moderecords.bandcamp.com/album/night-falling-mode-347
The fact that the works included on night, falling all seem to be large windows into different parts of the same world establishes a strong sense of familiarity. Yet various facets of the music actively work against that sense, leading to a prolonged, even permanent feeling of tension.
To a large extent this derives from the fact that Eckert’s musical language is profoundly elusive. Yet it’s not remotely distant – on the contrary, often it’s incredibly close; it feels tangible, its sounds distinct, discrete points of tactile solidity. No, this is music not so much at the periphery of perception as resolution: we hear, but we’re rarely sure what we are hearing, in terms of what specific sounds are, where they emanate from and how they relate.
The work that opens the album, späte Gegend for orchestra, demonstrates this uncertainty from the start, with rustling noise that could either be the product of one large or many small sources of movement. The ensuing texture of streaked pitches suggests friction, things rubbing hard together, while rumble leads to various impacts, more streaks and noise, lingering pitches, some of them ostensibly overtones, all very shadowy and skittery, made ominous by low growls. Even within these first couple of minutes we have to adapt our listening away from identity in favour of ambiguity. This is a landscape that’s not so much truly alien as just very foreign, though laden with traces that suggest, allude to and evoke sounds and gestures that are very familiar.
This tense listening state is also a kind of instinctive, sympathetic response to the fundamental character of Eckert’s soundworld, which is itself a paradigm of tension. In conjunction with its elusiveness, it’s also highly volatile. In general, this is a world where sounds move slowly (the seven compositions range from 11 to over 26 minutes in length, and they both need and earn those durations) and as such, it’s easy to be lulled into a sense that everything is under control – indeed, that control is perhaps the defining feature of this music. Nothing could be further from the truth. Returning to späte Gegend, barely a few minutes on from that mysterious introduction we’re confronted by a sequence of increasingly solid swells. They fall away into vague, muffled aftermaths, but finally there’s a huge eruption as some instrument from abyssal depths – akin to an unfathomable horn – heralds something unutterably momentous. Whereupon it’s all gone, leaving just a high, tinnitus tone and deep resonance from drums and gongs. It may not be a place where chaos reigns, yet unclarity and uncertainty are endemic.
An additional aspect of this derives from the fact that many of these pieces incorporate electronic elements (both fixed media and live electronics), but at almost no point is it even remotely clear what those elements are contributing. That, in turn, makes one question almost everything – both electronic and instrumental – acting to undermine and distance even more the nature and details of what we hear. Furthermore, three of these pieces are presented as concertante works, yet here too the precise nature, contribution and, at times, even sonic identity of their respective soloists is similarly difficult to parse. The clearest is Schemen – Feld 30, where a contrabass clarinet moves within an electronic environment, though even here what constitutes the actual clarinet and possible extensions of its sounds and timbral palette is hard to tell. Eckert’s electronics conjure up monochromatic gothic splendour, impossibly vast, which the clarinet (mesmerisingly performed by Joachim Striepens) seems to meld with: sometimes vaporous, as if part of the grey open space; sometimes intimidatingly present, projecting impossibly deep tones that resound like primordial roars, even while everything dissipates to almost nothing. The dynamic range here and everywhere else is enormous, encompassing the most massive and the most microscopic, and everything in between.
Likewise the title work, Nacht, die fallende, where solo cello, orchestra and live electronics combine to form a homogeneous electroacoustic mixture. More streaks, more rumbles, now as the extreme poles of a vague but unmistakably heightened music, no longer merely tense, now taut. A weird major third materialises, is pulled apart, and the poles exert an immense force causing a dizzying swell. Beyond it, still polarised, things continue unfocused, a slow melange of cello squall and remote, suggestive atmospherics. Here, the balance – if that’s the right word – is in the nature of that wide polarity, between tectonic movement below and more rapid activity above. Again the volatility, instances of inner expansion that never stop sounding overwhelming and massive, despite never being full-blown outbursts; again the inscrutable, inseparable solo instrument, one element fused with all the others.
ferne Tiefe for contrabass flute, orchestra, live electronics and tape seemingly picks up where that piece leaves off. Nothing identifiable emerges for several minutes, instead forming an ominous, pulsing, singular sonic entity; maybe a trace of brass here, a string there, but everything is once again melded into the whole. Over four minutes pass before the flute makes its presence felt – although, high and overtone-riddled, it’s impossible to extricate it from adjacent sounds. Instead, we’re pulled by the huge gravitational pull of the sound mass, looming and colossal, until – the other end of this music’s instability – Eckert tilts everything into erasure, a blank texture of granular noise and almost palimpsestical traces of pitch (but from where? of what??).
By integrating diverse musical elements in this way, the organic nature of the music is significantly increased. Indeed, these pieces are like true, large-scale sonic organisms, undergoing gradual processes of activity, evolution and transformation that have an unassailable internal logic. This is all the more remarkable when one considers the mind-boggling range of sounds that appear in Eckert’s music, perhaps even more so when, just once or twice, they’re actually identifiable (such as an incredible moment around nine minutes into späte Gegend, when a singing bowl makes a brief appearance).
Kisalpah for ensemble and electronics continues this ongoing exploration, again making acoustic and electronic inextricable, in a tantalising way that’s more enigmatic. The volatility is different here; no eruptions but instead recurring bursts of clatter that are consistently troubling, as if they had a tone of authority to them. It seems as if it might clarify into something tangible, via pitches and whistles, but it ultimately remains strange and defocused, in perhaps the most aloof and remote of these pieces. If they are, as i’ve suggested, all windows into the same soundworld, Kisalpah is located far in its interior, a place that’s enclosed, the most exotic, furthest from familiar reference or focal points.
im Endlichen, dehnbar for solo accordion is a rare example on the album of greatly increased focus, due to the use of just a single instrument. It’s like a distillation of what we’ve encountered so far writ small. The accordion (played by Eva Zöllner) is unstable, seemingly trying with increasing violence to free itself from recurring sustained notes. Frustration becomes incandescent, but the strongest connection to the other works comes as it descends, almost ‘singing’ in the form of a deep cluster, as if a single voice had been refracted into a tightly bunched-up chorus. (One can’t help wondering if somehow this is what lies at the core of all this music, perhaps giving rise to it all.)
The album concludes with instead of (empty rooms II) for ensemble and tape, and while it might seem as if, by now, after nearly two hours exploring this soundworld, there’d be nowhere left to go, the piece proves decidedly otherwise. Here, the sonic unclarity that typifies this place is seemingly turned inside out. While there’s a primary emphasis on pitch, it’s blurred and hazy, to the extent that the music sounds like an imagined presence – or, even more apt, a kind of ‘amplified absence’. Ghost music. The ensemble seems to be trying to articulate something beyond utterance, their erratic nature akin to that of the accordion previously, a form of frustration arising from the necessity of the urge clashing with the impossibility of the action.
This is, very simply, among the most dazzling and exciting music – acoustic, electronic, electroacoustic, whatever – you’re ever likely to encounter. Nothing is as it seems; indeed, everything seems to transcend the very notion of ‘seeming’. All of it is just wondrously new. Prepare to be arrested and bewildered, overwhelmed and stunned, and when its 134 minutes have elapsed, to be itching to experience it all over again. This is what makes night, falling, by far, the Best Album of 2025.
— https://5against4.com/2025/12/31/best-albums-of-2025-part-2/
31 December 2025
