In Lunz 3, what seem like longer phrases and themes are more often made up of a series of discrete, overlapping musical ‘events’, connected more by their inherent, delicate musicality than by their wildly scattered origins. For Achim and I, it’s an aesthetic we’ve explored often – indeed, Achim‘s musical beginnings in 1960’s Berlin with its Fluxus and Actionist ‘happenings’ virtually wrote the book on the restless deconstruction and recontextualizing of older forms. More recently, my Roedelius Cells project, a multichannel audio installation, explores the malleability of sound in a different way – thousands of short edits extracted from a decade of Achim’s piano improvisations, reimagined into layered, syncopated, and entirely new compositions, happily blurring the distinction between listener and composer.
But all this talk of ‘method’ probably misses the point entirely. Like the original Lunz (its successor Inlandish, and all of our music really), the experience hopefully transcends its sources and processes, and becomes its own living, breathing organism. As always, it is stumbling upon those magical, nuanced moments – Achim’s unfailing ability to find just the right note, the most distinctive, effortless phrasing – that are the true revelations for me. Embracing the still-widening echoes of our dear departed friend Moebi, straddling that knife-edge between the quirky and the ravishing. Even now, 15 years on, Lunz still resonates deeply with me, the album’s music intertwined with so many years of friendship. In Lunz 3, I hope we were able to cobble together a new little creature, one with a curious personality and a DNA all its own.
(Tim Story, 2019)