Two years ago, the German pop music magazine Spex (a bit like Option in German) called the Viennese Werner Dafeldecker "a Jim O'Rourke from the Alps." The comparison strikes one as quite distorted but is based on a few things in common. Both represent an extended idea of improvisation that does not rest upon parameters like "interaction," "dynamics," or "energy," but rather that appears airy, looser, more comprehensive: (sound in) space becomes more important, the occasion plays a bigger (more existential) role in the foreground. Indeed this occasion is not only another situation to improvise together, but rather an expression of a state that one should adjust his/her sensors completely anew. The influence of new music (the New York School and beyond) never seems apparent, but as it were, subcutaneously. Just like the improvisations of O'Rourke in the 90's, Dafeldecker's music is characterized by the logical but constantly surprising intervention that breaks the peaceful current of the music and continues it at the same time.
Eis-9 [Ice Cream 9] is a summer record, no hermetic structures, no gloomy sounds, no wallowing in stagnation and hardening (= cold). Ice cream melts.
Dafeldecker demonstrates here once more how he dissociates his strict instrumentalism (dealing with the instrument as essential sound material) from his original instrument, the contra bass, and transfers it to others: guitar, percussion, found objects, PowerBook. Just as gropingly as definite.
Eis-9 is above all the product of an intensive cooperation with the Berlin/Viennese electronic musician Boris D. Hegenbart. Coming out of nowhere, he published the CD Hikuito in 1998, music developed in hand made paper that came to fragile melodies once peeling away its (apparent) influences (Carl Stone, Oval).
The groping and the definite flowed into the Eis-9 cooperation. Improvised music as symbiosis, as something that does not only come into being in the instant, but rather that grows. Eis-9 also means "ice cream" is not an unambiguous fixed construction, but one that dissolves in various forms, structures, and, well, states.

Werner Dafeldecker (also on GROB431, GROB435, GROB541, GROB547)

Boris D Hegenbart

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