In the beginning there is naked fear. “Elemental Fear”, the first track on Noémi Büchi’s debut album, begins with a flurry of synthesizer flashbulbs. These are sounds that you don’t often hear: rough and unforgiving – apparently aimless. The Swiss calls what she does neoclassic. But by that she doesn’t mean a connection to the melancholic gentleness of Richter, Einaudi and Frahm. Rather, with the eight tracks on “Matter” she wants to free herself from the shackles that she was put on on the way to becoming a classical musician. In the past, Büchi would probably have been called an avant-gardist. What is meant today is that something like this doesn’t fit into a playlist. This music has a concept and is bigger than its parts.
The training is almost textbook: early piano playing, a doctor attested perfect pitch, conservatory, musicology studies. Then comes the first detour: art school and a master’s degree in electroacoustic composition. But Büchi, who sometimes talks about her own art in a somewhat distanced manner in conversation, as if it wasn’t her at all, longed for a way out of the academic undergrowth. First find a language for your own art, a sound. “Always having to verbalize everything was difficult at the beginning, but then it also helped me,” says Büchi, and calls it a form of love-hate.
Noémi Büchi tries to evade categories
Language is not so great for her, but noises and sounds have always been material for her. Something she can express herself with. She philosophizes about a world in which everything is material that you can, maybe even have to, shape. As the painter has his colors, so does she have her sounds as a musician. For her first steps in Zurich’s avant-garde electro scene, Büchi was able to fall back on audio recordings that she had made over the years. Every hum and buzz tells something and has to be recorded. She also uses classical works for herself by taking them apart. For her first record she now tears Bach and Nielsen to pieces (only on “Memorizing By Heart”, the sixth of eight tracks, does one hear something of a structure that one thinks one knows, samplings, perhaps an echo of Wendy’s early work Carlos). She names Éliane Radigue as a role model and raves about Oneohtrix Point Never. Also a musician who tries to escape the categories. In electro music, one is quickly pigeonholed, says the 31-year-old.
As demanding as Büchi’s music is, it also challenges itself. “I went through a mental process when composing,” she says. “The titles refer to the different phases of trauma processing.” It begins with uncontrolled primal fear, then anger follows. There are also sudden “causes of forgetfulness”. There is no linear movement of healing in trauma. The conclusion with “Prelude For Rational Freshness” finally points a way into the light. The restless drone sound sculpture of “Matter” finds a twilight balance here, even if everything is still pulsating.
So is reason a way out of the hell of fear? “I don’t really want to say anything, I just want to express something,” Büchi carefully counters. Interpretation takes place on that level of verbalization that she prefers not to let get too close. Then she says: “Reason is important for the process, it makes everything appear a little more differentiated, with less impulsiveness.”
What helps against the restlessness of emotions is a form. For Noémi Büchi, this is working with modules. She used to borrow the devices to try them out, she bought them, resold them, and developed her own range. This now serves on stage so that the Swiss can be her own orchestra. It has a fader for each sound. Büchi calls her work symphonic maximalism, although she actually pursues a minimalist approach to her art. But it is precisely the search for fullness and complexity of the sound structures that drives them. She does this to overwhelm herself and others. And so her concerts, for which she is currently developing another audiovisual concept to allow the music to breathe and develop live, are also an attempt to challenge her audience in every conceivable way.
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