Cusp
Cusp is a collection of compositions taken from the soundtrack for the film STRESS by Florian Baron. The feature-length documentary gives voice to five young veterans, their experiences and trauma.
Jana Irmert’s work was awarded the German Documentary Film Music Award in 2019. In her soundtrack, she “dissolves the boundaries between sound design and musical composition in a virtuoso and at the same time self-evident way, thus creating a sound cosmos that, through uncompromising reduction, generates brutal knowledge." (jury statement)
All tracks produced, mixed and mastered by Jana Irmert
Cover photography by Maria Louceiro
© 2020 Fabrique Records
"We are dealing with a collection of sensorial tracks, inhabited by darkness and viscosity, haunted dreams and rugged geographies. The atmospheres draw moving cartographies crossed by jolts and breaks, bristling their drones on deserts with unstable dunes. Cusp is a masterful work of intensity and emotion, of trauma and disorder. Intense."
"The eight electroacoustic compositions begin with free-flowing, atmospheric drones to create timeless narrative structures (Them Or Me). Gradually the sound becomes slower and darker (Fog) moving from the image of perfect calm that Irmert had created with the second track to a constant anxiogenic state in the third.
There is no shortage of abstract electronic synthesis moments jagged with light percussive echoes (Persevere) while with the use of field recordings and rhythmic accents the German composer continues in the wake of End of Absence by having the listener create the dimensions of her cosmos and the objects within it.
Closing Cusp, The Road Going Home II, is the summary of what you will hear in the album: drones with oscillators as dark as softer sounds marked by the search for harmonies, all using the smallest number of elements seeking in the essential that extra weapon to reach the listener.
The art of creating spaces through music, of making the listener the protagonist of this process makes Cusp, in its 20 minutes of music, turn out to be an amazing work."